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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25157461">Rebellion</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deviled_Peg/pseuds/Deviled_Peg'>Deviled_Peg</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Lucifer (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Celestial Music, Episode: s03e11 City of Angels?, Existential Crisis, Freedom and Loss, Galaxy-hopping, Gen, Heaven, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scenes, The Rebellion, Wing-ectomy, Worldbuilding, humans!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:15:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>20,067</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25157461</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deviled_Peg/pseuds/Deviled_Peg</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Are you in the mood for a little REBELLION?</p><p>This 5-chapter story is based on episode 3x11, “City of Angels?” In my story, I reimagine a couple of scenes near the end of that episode and fill in many “missing scenes.”</p><p>Summary: Amenadiel honors the deal. Lucifer then embarks on a Heavenly mission. He seeks a lost treasure, relives The Rebellion (as Samael), loses his wings, and, unexpectedly, he loses more. But Mazikeen is at his side, so everything’s all right, yeah?</p><p>First, a bit of a reminder about “City of Angels.” In this flashback episode, Amenadiel asks for Luci’s help, and Luci agrees, in exchange for “a blank check.” Here, Luci is about to fill in the blank. My story begins immediately after Lucifer says, “As a wise woman once said to me, if you really want to rebel, move to LA.”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Amenadiel &amp; Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Mazikeen &amp; Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Liquid Heaven</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ChristieY">ChristieY</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in literary journals, but this story is quite different than anything I've ever done. I hope you enjoy the result! I'd love it if you'd let me know.</p><p>Also, any suggestions for what tags I should use would be most welcome. Thanks!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="yellow">
<p></p><div class="hero"><h1>REBELLION</h1><p>
    <span class="cafe">
      <span class="inner"></span>
    </span>
  </p></div><p>Muscled shoulders squared, stubborn neck thrust forward, face as harsh as Judgment Day, his brother replied, “You’re coming back to Hell with me. There’s <em>no</em> discussion.”</p><p>Amidst the gutted carcass of Rico’s MMA Fight Arena—the ripped wall posters of blood-lusting combatants, the eyeless glares of overhead lights, the stripped fight pit—Amenadiel stood toe-to-toe with him. His brother wore not his silvery gray robes of Heaven but the Earth clothes—royal purple shirt, khaki slacks—that Lucifer had picked out so Amenadiel would fit in with the humans, so the two of them could more easily track down Amenadiel’s stolen Divine necklace. Which they had. Because Lucifer’s cunning plan had worked. Because Lucifer had ferreted out suspects. Because Lucifer had arranged Amenadiel’s MMA match. Because Lucifer had trained Amenadiel to disguise his angelic strength and fight like a human.</p><p>Amenadiel, the ingrate.</p><p>“Yes.” Lucifer hissed the word. A smile, as taut and thin as a wire, pulled his lips tight to his teeth. “You see, this is where it gets interesting. We made a deal, didn’t we? For a favor to be named later. <em>Later</em> is now, Brother.”</p><p>Call him evil, would Amenadiel? Well, suffering the slur would be worth it. Worth every bruise, every gash, every bone-rattling and brain-battering blow Amenadiel had inflicted on him after he’d slipped himself into Amenadiel’s match.</p><p>At first, he’d planned to make Amenadiel pay for the slur by defeating The Firstborn in a fair fight:</p><p>The ref rang the bell. The house erupting in cheers, jeers, hoots and halloos, Lucifer fired off a left, a right, a left, bloodying Amenadiel’s slandering mouth. A kick to Amenadiel’s gut hurled big bro against the fight-cage wire. Lucifer cornered him. A right, another right, a knee strike. The house roared. Yet, Amenadiel refused to fight back. Lucifer’s gloved hands gripped Amenadiel’s head, pressed him to the cage. Lucifer laughed, a sound as cold and comfortless as the tomb that’d encased his heart at his brother’s words.</p><p>He thrust his face close, laced his voice with a swagger. “I’ll make sure I tell everyone in Heaven and Hell how the undefeated warrior lost to his loser, <em>evil,</em> little brother.”</p><p>Amenadiel shook under his grip, Amenadiel’s very atoms raging, craving to rupture their bonds, fly apart, destroy all of Creation.</p><p>Lucifer leaned in closer, flicked his gaze up and down Amenadiel. “Not so tough after all, are you, eh?” He plunged the verbal knife: “Daddy’s boy!”</p><p>That did the trick.</p><p>Amenadiel’s fists slammed into Lucifer’s ribs. He struck. And struck. And struck again and again, overpowering Lucifer, nearly taking his damned head off. Lucifer’s punches whiffed past. Amenadiel’s blows connected. Cut lip. Cut nose. Cut eyes. An uppercut to Lucifer’s chin flung him against the cage, blood geysering from his mouth, cage links rattling. Lucifer crumpled to the mat, sweat-soaked, blood-soaked, the screams for Amenadiel pummeling his soul. But with one kind of victory lost, another presented itself:</p><p>
  <em>Go ahead, Brother! Beat me senseless! Show all the world you’re not the holier-than-thou Angel you hold yourself to be!</em>
</p><p>Amenadiel clamped his hand around Lucifer’s throat, Amenadiel’s face a snarled knot of anger and righteousness. “I <em>am</em> better than you.”</p><p>Amenadiel pulled him to his feet in a stranglehold. Lucifer’s heart bolted, his lungs grabbing for air that’d ceased to exist. Did God’s Mightiest intend to prove his moral superiority by choking the life out of the Devil? Not exactly the triumph Lucifer sought, but—</p><p>Amenadiel had snatched this victory away from him too. Let him go, threw the fight per the original plan, got back the Dad-given necklace.</p><p>The Dad-given, silver necklace that Amenadiel now proudly peacocked, his royal purple shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest to display the length of his dangly rod.</p><p>Not that Lucifer begrudged Amenadiel his pretty trinket. On the contrary—</p><p>The Firstborn jerked back a pace. As if he could sense that a trap baited with his necklace lay camouflaged at his feet.</p><p><em>Yes, Brother, and the trap is about to bite your ankles.</em> “My ask is quite simple.”</p><p>An ask. Not, unfortunately, a demand. If Amenadiel hadn’t been a Celestial, Lucifer might’ve flashed his Devil Eyes, might’ve studded his voice with the Hellish subsonic rumbles that hurled his demons to the Underworld’s ashy ground. But an Angel of God would not be cowed. An Angel of God would be enraged. An Angel of God might call upon other Angels of God, or even upon Dad Himself, to help him make the Devil suffer for his insolence. Make him suffer in ways Lucifer didn’t want to imagine.</p><p>No, all he could do was state his request. Forcefully. Adding in a smidge of Infernal reverberation, a brief jolt through Amenadiel’s nervous system—just enough to transmit a shake to Amenadiel’s bones, a rattle to his teeth, a tingle to his fingertips. Give a Devil that much.</p><p>The Hell energy pulsed through Lucifer’s chest.</p><p>“<em>Leave—</em>”</p><p>Above him, the five hundred accent lightbulbs flared as bright as doomed souls streaking towards Hell.</p><p>“<em>Me—</em>”</p><p>Half the lights sputtered out, crackling, spitting; in the semi-dark, flickering emergency lights burst on, fragmenting their faces into Hell-red blotches and Hell-black shadows.</p><p>“<em>Be.</em>”</p><p>Another quarter of the lights exploded, razor-sharp slivers slashing through the air and clawing for their throats. Falling just short.</p><p>Amenadiel’s left eyelid, the one Lucifer had blackened, twitched. Amenadiel’s tongue took a quick swipe at his lower lip. But God’s Mightiest<em>—</em>a.k.a. God’s Most Obstinate<em>—</em>probably blamed the creepshow on faulty wiring.</p><p>“You know I can’t do that.”</p><p><em>Trap sprung. </em>Finally, finally, after all these eons, would he now get the chance to freely explore all his wants? Excitement coursed through Lucifer’s blood, thrummed through his arteries and veins—a thrum low-pitched, primitive, <em>delicious.</em> “Isn’t it a sin for an Angel to break a vow?”</p><p>Amenadiel stilled, as though a fist had closed over his warrior’s heart and stopped its beating. But had Amenadiel unleashed a secret power too? For a sudden sadness seemed to drop from the sky, like a net. Wrapping itself around them. Whisking them away. To another place, another time, long before The Fall, when they were young, giggling Angels playing Truth or Dare. Amenadiel eternally chose Truth; Samael forever chose Dare.</p><p>“Oh, Luci, Luci, <em>think.</em> Father will be furious. And you <em>will</em> suffer His Wrath.”</p><p><em>Ah, Brother. Been there. Done that. Bought the damned T-shirt.</em> “Then He knows where to find me.”</p><p>Amenadiel reached for him—</p><p>And Lucifer nearly sprang backward, nearly unfurled his wings, nearly whipped forward the ax-sharp primary feathers, despite Angel No-No Number #2: Thou Shalt Not Deploy Thy Wings Against Thy Sibling. He would not be snatched away to Hell! Not without putting up a feather-to-feather fight. No matter if Amenadiel sliced him into a pile of bloody flesh and quills.</p><p>But Amenadiel merely clasped his shoulder—</p><p>From out of nowhere, a warmth poured through Lucifer’s heart like a flash flood of liquid…Heaven? No. No. Merely his body’s bewildered reaction to Amenadiel’s touching him in, in kinship?</p><p>Amenadiel strode from the room, and Lucifer, his heart still riding on the strange, frolicking waves of golden bliss, leaned his hands on the railing overlooking the fight pit.</p><p>Touch. Until this moment, he’d felt no brotherly or sisterly touch in all the eons since his Fall. No Hell-doomed human soul ever wanted to touch him, of course. No demon, except one, dared touch him with familiarity, for he was their king—not a friend, not a compatriot. Mazikeen, the exception—and the first creature to light the torch of his sexual urges—had taught him sexual touches, and he’d invented more of his own to reciprocate. What delicious wickedness those skills had tempted him into! During his brief visits to Earth, humans craved his sexual touches, craved giving him such touches in return. Win-win! Though, if they unexpectedly gave him the other kind of touch, the, the friendly type—a quick hug-with-a-smile, a passing pat on the shoulder—he found himself recoiling. Perhaps he didn’t trust those touches. Sex touches, deal handshakes, those he trusted: quid pro quo.</p><p>And was that it? He was choosing Earth for the sake of sex touches, for the sake of the momentary thrill of the deal, for the sake of other fleeting delights? But what else <em>could</em> there be? What did humans actually have to offer him, powerful, Immortal Being that he was?</p><p>What else did he <em>want?</em></p><p>Lucifer moseyed over to the looted bar. He rummaged for a tumbler. He poured himself two amber fingers from a lonely bottle.</p><p>Maybe…their acceptance. He always told them straight out he was the Devil, and they never rejected him. Of course, they, the fun ones, never believed him. Why did they not? <em>This is me, </em>he wanted to cry at those moments.<em> This is what the Devil is really like! </em>But Amenadiel would always crash his party and whisk him back to Hell before he’d ever had the time to convince any of them. Not unless he flashed his Devil Face. Which would stir up…what? Genetic memories implanted in their brains by Dad? Primitive fears of the boogeyman? And then, toodle-oo, fun times.</p><p>But nevermore.</p><p>Lucifer sipped a kiss of the whisky’s smoky sweetness. Floor-to-ceiling poles dotted the fight gallery, and, tumbler in hand, he twirled his way from pole to pole like in a Maypole Dance—from stripper tables to ringside lounge to under the neon sign proclaiming, <em>Girls! Girls! Girls!</em> The stench of fighters’ sweat and stale perfume still soured the air, but this place belonged to him now. Here, he’d build his new kingdom—</p><p>Lucifer slunk his gaze Heavenward, a smile nipping at the corners of his lips. <em>Yes, my new kingdom: The Kingdom of Devil on Earth. I will call my kingdom “Lux,” and I will fill it with my Light. I will fill it with swirling bodies and alcohol and endless flirtations. I will fill it with</em>—</p><p>He twirled his way from pole to pole into the sunken fight pit, trashed now, half-shorn of its cage wire, its supporting posts all cockeyed. The fight pit, where Amenadiel had dropped to his knees and submitted to him, falsely, and the cheers of the MMA crowd had crashed on Lucifer’s ears like jangled chords. But now, Triumph, always an elusive lover twisting out of his embrace, swaggered in, planted her feet, and sounded her melodious horn.</p><p>No, not a horn, but a—</p><p>Yes! The fight pit, the perfect spot for a—</p><p>“This place could use a piano!” he told the dust motes swirling in the half-shadowed, half-red room. “My <em>celestial</em> piano!” And he twirled in place—</p><p>
  <em>I will fill my kingdom with my laughter.</em>
</p><p>And laughter sprang out of his soul. Laughter that bent him in two, his arms wrapped around his middle, his body flopped against the cage wire. Laughter that left him gasping and wiping his eyes. Laughter that divided his life into Before the Birth of Lux and After the Birth of Lux. Laughter bright and merry and infused with a joy he hadn’t known in—</p><p>Well, <em>ever.</em></p></div>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Back Soon!</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="yellow">
<p></p><div class="hero"><h1>REBELLION</h1><p>
    <span class="cafe">
      <span class="inner"></span>
    </span>
  </p></div><p>“Ugh.”</p><p>The Lux penthouse bathroom mirror, framed in filigreed gold, lazed over more than half the black marble wall, as if it were the Supreme Ruler of Mirrors lounging in a Roman bath, and every last inch of it smirked at him, delighting in displaying his injuries’ teeniest, tiniest, most gruesome details.</p><p>“Go on, have your laugh, get it all out.”</p><p>A slash bisected his nose. A Hell’s rainbow of bruises uglified his right eye. A forked gash gouged his left cheek. His body? Lumps and bumps, and lumps <em>upon</em> his bumps.</p><p>(“I will not stoop to your level,” Amenadiel snarled. <em>Jab, cross, hook, uppercut, body-rip, repeat, repeat, repeat—and a blistering straight punch finish, right between the eyes, which, if Lucifer had been human, would’ve either killed him outright or left him, for the rest of his life, a gibbering idiot.</em>)</p><p>Lucifer unzipped the toiletry bag that a human at Rodeo Drive’s House of Bijan had helped him outfit, in exchange for a messy, sexy game of “Gentlemen, Start your Engines”— humanity and Divinity all over the shelves and racks of Prada, Gucci, Versace! He pawed through the bag, scanning the items and tossing them onto the white marble counter. Condoms, Mr. Salesman not believing that he was genetically incompatible; Fall Boy’s Liquid Guyliner, Mr. Salesman not believing that, when he’d burst into life after Mum and Dad’s Big Bang, his eyelids had been naturally lined black—</p><p>Ah! There it was. Product, to untangle and tame. (“Samael, your hair is as wild and curly as a fat-cheeked cherub’s,” Uriel teased, and little Sammy cried.)</p><p>He did battle with a jar of Mythical’s Heavy-Duty Pomade. Then, another mirror check.</p><p>“Ugh.” But as good as it would get. Besides, no matter how disheveled or banged-up he looked, he always outshone his brothers. Right, bros?</p><p>He hummed a bit of the Misfits’ “Speak of the Devil”:</p><p> </p><p>Traded in my bible for a little black cat<br/>
The time of Armageddon’s here<br/>
Some call me the son of the morning<br/>
God knows I’m the angel of light</p><p> </p><p>He tugged at the cuffs of his devilishly black Burberry—also courtesy of a little <em>Vroom! Vroom!</em>—and slipped his whisky flask from the suit’s inner pocket. He gulped a slug of smoky sweet. Then he moseyed toward the penthouse balcony.</p><p>His footsteps slapped against Italian marble floors and echoed in the dark-paneled rooms and passageways. Unlike the downstairs soon-to-be-Lux-nightclub, no fixer-upper, this penthouse. Rather, he’d taken ownership—thanks to a little morally ambiguous deal-making—of a sumptuous abode, worthy of his Divine presence, with an unholy energy both playful and dangerous tumbling through its spaces.</p><p>Once he adorned this apartment with his treasures, <em>voila,</em> his Deviltuary would be complete!</p><p>Here, in the bedroom, he’d clothe the walls in ancient Hindu temple stones and bas reliefs—Ganesha and Shiva and Rama and Sita. Here, on the way into the living area, he’d create a room divider with a Renaissance stained glass window of chubby <em>putti.</em> Over there, the living area’s floor-to-ceiling bookcases he’d cram with thousands of original-scribbled manuscripts and first-print books<strong>.</strong></p><p>And then here, at the heart of the living area, at the heart of Lux, his piano—Oh, Dad, he could almost feel his fingers stealing over the Divine ivories, almost feel Immortal Music stealing out of his soul; <em>I want that; I want that again!</em>—would reign supreme. Above it, his chandelier, its branches those of the eternal Yggdrasil “World Tree,” would cast its warm, cosmic light.</p><p>Yes, his celestial piano and all his Earthly treasures would find a home here, treasures gifted to him by kings, queens, playwrights, artists, poets, and thinkers, treasures he hadn’t known why he was squirreling away, given how little chance he’d ever had to enjoy them while on one of his brief Earth visits, but squirreled away nevertheless.</p><p>Why <em>had</em> he squirreled them away?</p><p>He glugged more whisky.</p><p>Maybe…because the givers would drop to dust long before their gifts would, and he’d wanted to preserve little pieces of their genius?</p><p>Or maybe…</p><p>He glugged another slug.</p><p>Maybe because those wondrous people, the cream of humanity, had appreciated him, had stirred up good feelings within him, and he’d sought to hoard those good feelings to try to offset all the bad that many humans—and all Celestials—thrust upon him?</p><p>Huh.</p><p>He slid open the balcony door. A fall-grumpy evening breeze ruffled his hair and wafted over whiffs of pansy, lavender, and lemon-tree scents from the garden pots. He took a deep sniff.</p><p>“Marvelous.”</p><p>He ambled toward the railing, reaching into his pants pockets for a<em> Vroom! Vroom! </em>silver cigarette case and lighter. He selected a cig and gave it a deep sniff too. A rich, dry, woody aroma. Nothing like this sinful pleasure existed on the Infernal Plane. All Hell-loop cigarettes tasted like charred sticks, smelled like sweaty armpits, and imparted no adrenaline rush—just another torture for those human souls who’d been addicted to nicotine during their Earthly years, as they desperately fumbled in their pockets for just one more hit. Again. And again. And again.</p><p>The cig between his lips, he cupped his hands at his mouth, warding off the breeze, and flicked his new lighter. Once, twice, thrice—</p><p>“Gah!” How hard could this be!</p><p>He reared back his arm to hurl the bloody lighter across the universe—</p><p>
  <em>Would you look at that?</em>
</p><p>His arm checked, mid-swing, the act hijacked by the balcony view of the city. He pinched the unlit cigarette from his mouth and rested his hands on the glass railing.</p><p>“Oh. My.”</p><p>His gaze rose to the sky, and then slowly drifted over the metropolis spread out before him. And it was almost as if he were sitting on his Hell throne, miles-high above his realm, for a massive swirl of purple-black clouds hulked low over L.A., much like the maelstrom of ash-raining clouds that roiled over Hell.</p><p>Behind him, the whispered swish of soft-soled boots. His demon—five feet and seven inches of coiled muscle, Hellcat reflexes, and temper of the same—joined him at the railing. She too took in the sky.</p><p>“Just like home,” Mazikeen said.</p><p>“No,” he said.</p><p>Here, no towering basalt spires crowded the land and plucked at his eyes. Here, no imploring screams of the damned—packed in those towers, cell above cell above cell, floor after floor after floor—scraped his eardrums. Here, no stench of brimstone stung his nostrils. Rather, here, warm city lights jeweled the view. Here, traffic honked in the distance like migrating geese. And here, a multi-flowered bouquet of pleasing smells, from foods to perfumes to, simply, living bodies, would scent the rest of his days. Yes, this was where he belonged. <em>Nothing</em> would ever induce him to return to Hell.</p><p>“Dearie me, Mazikeen, you’ll need a whole new wardrobe.”</p><p>She bared her teeth, as if he’d insulted her warrior bloodline. “What’s wrong with this?” She picked at her clothing.</p><p>“Hmm, let’s have a think.”</p><p>He’d meant to sweep his gaze down her body, but, for a moment, it got snagged on her face. Angled cheekbones, cut so high they caught the light like diamond facets. Plump, biteable bottom lip. Flawless, café-au-lait complexion. How could a demon radiate more beauty than any of his angelic sisters?</p><p>“Bulky leather-and-linen doublet; breastplate; steel-plated spaulders at your shoulders; couters at your elbows; poleyns at your knees— Nope! Nothing wrong with those, if you’re planning on launching yourself at all the humans and slitting their throats.”</p><p>From her leather weapons belt, Mazikeen’s curved-bladed demon dagger hissed free. It, and her grin, shone sharp and wicked. “Can I?”</p><p>“No. You’re not a demon warrior here. You’ll be a, a…” He fiddled with a cufflink, flicked the flaps of his suit coat, stuck the till-now forgotten cigarette in his mouth, lit up, puffed once, stubbed the cig out on the railing, and tossed it over. “A bartender.”</p><p>“A <em>what!</em>”</p><p>Her blade twirled around its forefinger loop like a whirling grim-reaper scythe. If he’d been anyone but her Lord and Master—well, <em>theoretically</em> her Lord and Master—all eight inches of that blade would’ve surely slit <em>his</em> throat.</p><p>“<em>Not</em> a lowly Hell bartender, Maze.” Ugh, the swill they served. “Something much, much, <em>much much much</em> classier. And you’ll keep Lux’s books, and be my serv—, erm, my assistant.”</p><p>“Oh, gee, Lucifer, that sounds like so much fun.” The blade twisted and glinted in her grasp, as if Hell-bent on breaking the ban against spilling Devil’s blood.</p><p>He slapped his hands together. “I know, right? Plus, remember your thrilling sex-torture of Tío?”</p><p>A smile prowled her lips. She ran her talented tongue along the demon blade as if it were a…</p><p>Well.</p><p>“All the sex you want here, Mazie—all shapes, all sizes, all combinations! A veritable cornucopia of carnal delights awaits!” Say, maybe they could even track down that hot babe from <em>Hot Tub High School </em>and rub-a-dub-dub with her! Yes, a hot tub! Over there, in the corner of the patio. Something intimate, seating eight lovely women and men. “But first—”</p><p>He stepped back from her, pulled out his flask, and took a fortifying nip.</p><p>Ah, Hell. He chugged the flask nearly dry.</p><p>“First, I have to pop up to Heaven. How do I look?” He smoothed a hand through his hair and again tugged at his cuffs.</p><p>“Lucifer—”</p><p>“Back soon!”</p><p>“Lucifer, we talked about this. Don’t chance it! Your stupid music-thingy probably got tossed into a black hole. Treated like celestial trash, like you.”</p><p>The muscles under his ribs bunched, as if a Hell-boa were coiling there, squeezing his guts. Surely his piano still existed. It <em>had</em> to. Mum had…</p><p>Lucifer’s soul drooped. <em>Oh, Mum. The worst moment of my life, You abandoning me too.</em></p><p>When he was a child, Mum had created the piano, just for him. He’d squealed, actually squealed, at the sight of it. He’d pushed over a puffy cumulus cloud for a bench and seated himself, and his feet could barely reach the piano’s pedals, but he could stretch wide his small hands to comfortably reach a tenth, and even an eleventh if he really, really stretched. <em>I knew you had piano hands,</em> Mum said, her golden aura beaming, her Presence wrapping around him like loving arms, her celestial kisses pressed to his neck as he played.</p><p>How the Divine rosewood piano case gleamed. How the ivories and ebonies warmed at his touch. And the sounds and the colors leaping out from the piano! <em>You make my heart catch, Samael,</em> Mum said, and a feeling rushed through his own heart like a wild, tumultuous river—how he adored her! His siblings gathered round, Raphael, Amenadiel, Michael, all of them, and they nodded their heads or swayed their bodies to the Immortal Music, with soft, silvery laughs tumbling from their lips—</p><p>“Lucifer, are you listening to me?”</p><p>“What? Oh.” He chattered his fingers against his thumb, making a blabbering hand-ducky. “Hearing you, not listening to you,” he singsonged. “Don’t be such a Debbie Downer—”</p><p>Her blade stabbed the air between them, millimeters from his chest.</p><p>He jerked back. “<em>Easy,</em> Mazie!”</p><p>Her blade waved under his nose, carving up oxygen. “And you <em>know </em>you’ve been banned. What if those sanctimonious dunderheads declare war?”</p><p>“Gah! You’d think I blunder off into disasters left and right!”</p><p>He rolled his shoulders. In a brilliant flash of white, his wings, stretching twenty glorious feet from tip to tip, whomped out. And three planters of purple pansies plonked to the deck. The miniature lemon tree sliced in two. Petals and tiny fruit flew.</p><p>“Oops.”</p></div>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Immortal Music</h2></a>
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<p></p><div class="hero"><h1>REBELLION</h1><p>
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  </p></div><p>Lucifer’s wings caught an ethereal thermal, propelling him past galaxies and gliding, gliding, gliding him into a perfectly breezeless day of Heavenly weather—the <em>endless</em> perfect weather enveloping the Kingdom of Heaven. Never, <em>never</em> too hot; never, <em>never</em> too cold; always, <em>always</em> 72F and sunny with Dad’s Love.</p><p>Well, <em>“always”</em> with one exception. The day he Fell.</p><p>Below him and two furlongs to the north, the Kingdom lay nestled amongst the clouds. Four white Walls, as white as a hill of baby lambs, surrounded the Kingdom’s unsurroundable, infinite-dimensional Infinity. On the Kingdom’s west side lapped the Ineffable Ocean, where deceased surfers found their perfect waves; on its east stretched the Desert of Contemplation, a hot spot for self-flagellating martyrs; on the north rose the Mountains of Bliss, tromped by intrepid, timeless trekkers; here, on the south side, the Straight and Narrow Path marched through the Forest of Glory, a paradise for nature lovers and birdwatchers.</p><p>And in the exact center of the Kingdom: The Silver City, dazzling in the Holy Light like a silver crown encrusted with jewels of silver-pink and silver-blue. Doubting Thomas, Patron Saint of Architects, had restructured the City, laying out its buildings on a system of concentric circles, and the buildings grew ever taller as they neared the focal point, the Grand Assembly Hall. The spire of this, the Holy Meeting Place, thrust upward from its surroundings like—</p><p>Well, like Dad’s middle finger, if you asked him.</p><p>The Holy Hour must’ve struck, for, even at this distance, the racket of harpists harping on their harps and the drone of Celestial voices, led by Castiel, gave his eardrums cramps. “Praise Be to Dad,” Castiel moaned. And, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Dad.” And, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our Dad.” And other suck-up stuff like that.</p><p>But did Sentry Angels stand guard, just in case, after all these eons of prickly peace, he returned to Heaven to inflame revenge? How far did Heaven’s defense system extend?</p><p>Incoming Devil at bearing x-y-z. Launch Interceptor Angels on My mark: Three. Two. One.</p><p>Nothing. Yet.</p><p>Lucifer chose a landing spot, a wispy cirrus. From a mile up, he plummeted, straight down, feet-first, his wings spread wide wide wide and held utterly motionless. Inches away from crash, he broke into a furious flurry of wing-flapping. Plummet stopped, velocity near-zip, he executed the most delicate of touchdowns, not a ripple of cloud disturbed. Just like the spectacular landings of Japanese cranes parachuting onto the Shinano River, which he’d witnessed while visiting Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC.</p><p>His had always been the most spectacular, the most heart-stopping, the most envied, of all Angel landings.</p><p>Well, not <em>always.</em> Not until he’d exited gawky adolescence. Then, not yet grown into his feathers, he would land high-speed, wings cockeyed, his legs churning across a cloud scurrying to catch up to his momentum. He’d fail, he’d trip, he’d skim headfirst, palms and chest stinging, skin left behind. Cloud-burn.</p><p>(“Samael, why can’t you <em>first</em> learn proper landing technique before you try to pull off daredevil stunts?” Amenadiel was always barking at him.)</p><p>Even back then, even <em>before</em> then—for as long as he could remember!—a vague discontent with his angelic lot had ghosted through the innermost rooms of his mind. A discontent his siblings had never given sign that they too felt. A discontent that had grown and grown until…</p><p>Lucifer set down an Earth package of piano moving straps atop the cloud. He stood and folded his wings loosely against his back. Here on the South Wall, three gates—the Gate of Zebulun, the Gate of Issachar, the Gate of Simeon—barred his entrance into Eternal Joy. And though the Gates appeared to be only three times as tall as he, if he should try to fly over them, even if he flew and flew until all his primaries fell out, the Gates would zoom higher and higher, and he’d never reach their tops. And though the Gates appeared to have only the thickness of three of his hand-breadths, if he should try to hammer his way through, even if he hammered and hammered until his arms broke off, the Gates would grow thicker and thicker, and he’d never breach them.</p><p>No, the Silver City and the Realm of Dad were well-protected against him. Their designated Evil One.</p><p>Wisps eddying about his feet, he traipsed across the cloud toward the Gate of Issachar. The Pearly Gates, three per Wall, twelve in all, weren’t twelve gigantic oyster pearls, of course—another silly Revelations metaphor—but lustrous rainbow colors swirled across their translucent white surfaces. Curiously, the closer he got to Issachar, the darker and grimmer the reds and greens and indigos hued, and the faster they swirled—speeding up, speeding up, vortexes now, violent whirls.</p><p>Did they do that at anyone’s approach?</p><p>He traipsed past the one-furlong “Highway to Heaven” marker—</p><p>Sirens shrieked, screaming through the air like a thousand tornado klaxons. Lucifer leapt, and nearly lost half his Immortal Life.</p><p>“What the fff—?”</p><p>Harps and songs ceased.</p><p>Lucifer stopped. He stood very, very still. A suffocating silence, deader than Jesus at midnight Good Friday, wrapped around him.</p><p>“H-hello?” His breath stuttered within his lungs, and the word came out a whisper.</p><p>No reply. Absolute Silence casketed God’s Kingdom.</p><p>A chill of fear spidered up Lucifer’s spine—the last time Heaven had gone soundless had been in the moments before he was cast out. He would’ve jammed his hands in his armpits to ward off the chill, to stop his trembles, but—</p><p>He sucked moisture into his mouth and then called out, “Hello? Anybody? Bravo, your Intruder Alert System functions <span class="nowrap">perfectly—</span>nearly scared the Hell out of me, heh, heh. But you can call off the drill now. It’s only me, Lucifer.”</p><p>He showed his palms. See? No concealed weapons here!</p><p>The lamb-white Wall shimmered.</p><p>“Um, h-hello?”</p><p>Thousands of eyes<em>—living eyes!—</em>popped open, splashed all over the Wall like anti-Devil gang graffiti.</p><p>Shit! Lucifer’s heartbeats clattered around his rib bones and scrambled up his throat and tried to squirt out his ears. He clapped his hand to his chest and laughed, trying for a “ha, ha, nice prank” laugh, but it sounded more like a rat’s squeal. “Okay, consider me officially creeped out. I, I only came to—”</p><p>Staring at him: shimmering eyespots the size of dinner plates, somewhat like those on a peacock’s train—fist-sized blobs of black inside circles of lapis-lazuli blue, inside ovals of copper, inside rims of jade green. The eyes, in pairs, changed positions, exchanged positions, silently. They slipped far up. Slipped far down. Slid to the left. Slid to the right. Glided from dead center to far away.</p><p>As if each eyespot—each Angel?—wished to scrutinize him from all angles.</p><p>He peered closer. Yes, Angels. And even though the pairs of eyes appeared to be identical, and even though no sibling had bothered to visit him since his Fall—except Amenadiel, to haul his arse back to Hell—he could identify the eyes’ owners.</p><p>There, Nathanael the Oceanographer, who, ages ago, had taken him on an Ocean expedition. Natty had given him a six-inch shark tooth from the skeleton of a sixty-foot Celestial Great White, and, curious as to what a shark bite felt like, he’d stupidly pricked the tooth clean through his palm. Natty had mended his young, bawling self.</p><p>There, Bernael, Professor of Philosophy and Logic, who’d told him he was hopeless at Ethics.</p><p>There, front and center, Michael, once his most beloved older brother, who’d taught string-bean Samael tricks for fighting stronger opponents.</p><p>“Brothers, Sisters, I, I came here to ask—”</p><p>The eyes stared at him, and glared at him, in silence.</p><p>“I, I—”</p><p>The eyes shuttered and vanished back into the white.</p><p>“Br-brothers? Sisters?”</p><p>Each Gate and each Wall bulged outward. Thousands of iron spikes, three feet long, thrust out from their surfaces, readying to impale The Enemy.</p><p>He’d been observed.</p><p>Judged.</p><p>Rejected.</p><p>Rejected.</p><p>Rejected.</p><p>Something sharp-nailed and needle-toothed flashed through Lucifer’s mind and tore into his heart—as if a pack of Hell-jaguars had raced out from The Twisted Forest, leapt on him, taken him down in a vicious fang and claw free-for-all. Better if Hell-jaguars had. Better still if his siblings had stormed through the Gates and ripped him limb from limb. Anything but to forever carry around in his soul this image of the Gates spiked against him.</p><p>He clutched his head in his hands. His wings drooped, their knifelike, perfect tips slicing through the wisps of cloud. Sounds and sights burned through his brain, pitiless acid: His call to Rebellion. Gabriel’s Trumpet ringing forth. Fistfights in the City streets. Thunder raking the skies. The Rebels driven out of the City, onto the Beach of Eternal Mercies. Waves roiling the Sea. Screams. Soldiers falling. Downed Angels scattered along the shoreline. Blood filming Samael’s tongue, the taste like sucking on old, rusty coins. The Opposition demanding his surrender. Samael’s leaping atop the Rock of Justice Tempered and pleading with them to just <em>listen.</em> The Golden Sword—</p><p>His Fall. His Fall into darkness and ash and…</p><p>Aloneness.</p><p>Lucifer pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. <em>I am your brother. Why do you treat me like this?</em></p><p>He fumbled inside his suit coat for his flask. But his fingers closed on nothing. Of course. Of damn course! The whisky hadn’t crossed Heavenly dimensions with him.</p><p>Strength dissolved from his legs, and he sank to his haunches.</p><p>No. No! He wouldn’t let them reduce him to this. He would shout his defiance—</p><p>But he couldn’t, his throat suddenly thick with treacherous tears.</p><p>He waited. One moment. Two. Then he inhaled sharply and drove off the weeps. He flung himself up to his feet and shook a fist at the Iron Barrier.</p><p>“I won’t let you, you hear me?”</p><p>But apparently, no one did.</p><p>Well, fuck ’em. He took out his pocket square, gave his eyes a swipe. Then, pocket square re-tucked, cuffs straightened, wings perked, he shammed a stroll toward the Gate of Issachar. After all, what was the worst that could happen?</p><p>Hell could happen. Annihilation could happen. The Divine Vortex could happen—and one experience of The Vortex in a lifetime was enough, thank you very much.</p><p>He stumbled to another stop. Maybe this had been a crap idea. But to turn tail now? Let them all laugh at him? No. No. Eons, <em>eons,</em> spent condemned to his fate in Hell. Suffering its privations. Burying his desires deep in his heart. And why? Trying to, what, do penance for his Rebellion and regain Father’s favor?</p><p>No more. Dad had abandoned him, his sufferings pointless. Now, he <em>wanted</em> that piano.</p><p>He strutted forward, relentless. He squeezed between spikes and pounded his palms against the Barrier. “Uriel? Uriel!”</p><p>No reply.</p><p>“Uriel, I know you guard the Gate of Issachar. Answer me!”</p><p>Lucifer pounded harder. He might not be able to breach the Gate, but he would pound and pound until he deafened all the Angels and the Saved.</p><p>He pounded. He pounded. He pounded.</p><p>“I can literally keep this up forever, you know.”</p><p>He pounded, pounded—</p><p>A piano plinked.</p><p>Lucifer’s palm checked in mid-air, in mid-strike. Oh, sweet…well, Dad. Could, could it be?</p><p>The piano plinked again. <em>His</em> piano, its dark, rich, perfect tones unmatched by any other piano, human-built or Celestial-created.</p><p>Lucifer scrambled backward and charged the Gate, hurling his body at it. But, of course, he nearly broke his damn shoulder and bounced off, not crashed through. And got himself speared in his left side by an iron spike. His breaths rasping, he pressed a hand to the graze, his blood drip-drip-dripping to the cloud-ground.</p><p>Silence, except for his breaths and dripping blood.</p><p>Maybe he’d wanted his piano so badly he’d conjured up the sound—</p><p>His piano plinked again.</p><p>He touched his fingers to the Spiked Iron Gate and leaned his forehead against it—would’ve crawled right inside the Wall if he could’ve. Anything to get closer to his piano. In Hell, time and again, like his own personal Hell-loop, he would claw his way out of sleep, his dreams wretched with the imaginings of his piano’s fate—the cherubim, swords raised,  swarming over his piano and slicing it into scraps of wood, snips of wire, chips of ivory, crumbs of ebony; or Dad Himself slamming down His Almighty Fist and smashing it to splinters—and he’d wake up flinging himself out of bed, trying to fling himself onto his imaginary piano to save it, screaming, <em>Mine! Mine! Mine! Please, oh please, don’t take this away from me too!</em></p><p>But his piano still existed.</p><p>The Hell-boa in Lucifer’s guts uncoiled, just a bit.</p><p>Then it coiled again, even tighter. Dad had given his piano to Uriel? Uriel, whose rhythm-deaf fingers couldn’t play “Chopsticks” without making mistake after mistake? Did Uriel know how much it meant to him? Know that, just as Amenadiel had done with him, he’d give Uriel a blank check if Uriel asked to deal?</p><p>Uriel plinked the piano again, yipping lyrics at him: “Knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s doh-oh-or.”</p><p>Lucifer’s hands fisted. “You’re hilarious, Uriel. Quit messin’ around on <em>my</em> piano, you feathery, pattern-loving pillock.”</p><p>Uriel kept plinking and howling like a dog with its tail <em>slammed</em> in Heaven’s doh-oh-or. His voice soared up and shattered somewhere above high C.</p><p>“Uriel! For Dad’s sake—for <em>all</em> our sakes—stop that noise right now and roll me out my piano. It’s <em>mine. </em>Mum gave it to <em>me.</em>”</p><p>“Lucifer, Lucifer, Lucifer,” slimed the smug little bastard, “you know I can’t open the Gate for you. What a shame you came all this way for nothing. But I knew you would, eventually.”</p><p>Uriel, always taunting him, always pranking him, when they were growing up. At times like this, he <em>desired</em> to rip the runt’s drab, gray-brown wren-wings right off his shoulders and club him senseless with them.</p><p>If he could only get his hands on him.</p><p>But if he could, he might embrace Uriel, a brother he’d not seen in eons.</p><p>“Roll it out here this instant! Or shall I tell everyone about the time we were playing ‘Meteors’ and you fired off that crazy pitch? Remember? How could you not! You nearly took my legs off, Amenadiel dove for it but couldn’t catch it, and the meteor—”</p><p>Plunged through Earth’s atmosphere. Poof! No more dinosaurs. Dad flared furious: The dinosaur! His crowning achievement! Surpassing even the exquisite amoeba! Gone!</p><p>Mum took the blame. Always protecting her children, Mum. With one itsy-bitsy exception. She stood apart, didn’t lift a Celestial Finger, uncaring as Dad cast him into—</p><p>“You want it, go get it.” The Spiked Iron Gate clanged open. Uriel wound up and pitched. Piano chords shrieked.</p><p>—“Bloody Hell!”</p><p>His piano whizzed overhead, zipping straight for the Milky Way, straight for Sol’s FireMouth.</p><p>Lucifer leapt, unfurling, shucking off gravity. His wings whooshed through the ether in a powerful downstroke, pulling him up high into the air. He flapped full out, chased cacophony. Gah! In thousands upon thousands of years, he’d put his wings through their paces about as often as he’d roller skated along Hell’s slip-sliding, Escher-like corridors, Hell not exactly enticing him to sightsee. His pecs and supracoracoideus muscles would pay him back for this.</p><p>Uriel, damn him. An acrid taste invaded Lucifer’s mouth, like he’d stuffed it full of Hell-cigarette butts. Damn Uriel for treating his piano this way. Damn Dad for giving it to him. And damn himself, for not being able to fly faster!</p><p>And yet… Wasn’t this thrilling! Hurtling along, the star colors blueshifting and redshifting around him, sapphire stars racing toward him and morphing into rubies speeding away, their bass singing voices coming at him and skidding up the scale to soprano voices flying past!</p><p>He hurtled through Heaven’s Heavenly Corona of Dad’s Love—bloody selective love—and the temperature plummeted to a chilly ‑454F. He hurtled across the universe, hurtled across the supercluster Laniakea, hurtled into the Local Group, hurtled into the spiral arms of the Milky Way. He gasped for breath, his wound stinging, his flight muscles burning with lactic-acid fire, his wings as heavy as neutron stars, their strokes fledgling-sloppy—</p><p>
  <em>No! No! Can’t give up now! My piano!</em>
</p><p>With a burst of speed from Dad-knew-where, he hurtled into Sol’s system. He hurtled past the outer planets, past Earth’s watery blue, past Venus’s volcanic orange, past Mercury’s cratered gray. As he neared the always-raging Sol, the temperature soared to a warmish 797F, and his Lightbringer speed—the fastest of Dad’s Angels—increased frictional forces and heated up space gases to even hotter, ionizing them, a sharp, metallic smell—like welding fumes—smiting the ether, a trail lighting up behind him—</p><p>Would Earth astronomers label him a comet?</p><p>Piano chords screamed for his help.</p><p>“I’m coming!”</p><p>Closing in on it now, so close, so close, feet away—</p><p>A solar flare shot out, hissing, its fiery tongue flicking, eager to fuel itself on the piano’s Divinity.</p><p>With one last desperate downstroke, Lucifer surged forward. And snagged a piano leg.  He and Sol’s Gravity played a vicious game of tug of war—Sol straining to devour not only the piano but him!</p><p>“Let go! Mine!” Lucifer frantically beat his wings back and forth like a damned celestial hummingbird—</p><p>Sol’s grip broke.</p><p>Lucifer yanked the piano to him as his wings hurled him into reverse. He snarled a smile at Sol. “Ha! I win!”</p><p>His piano! Safe!</p><p>One hundred and twenty thousand miles later, Lucifer’s momentum slowed. He waved a wingtip at Sol—best not to leave Sol grumpy, for the Celestial might unleash a retaliatory, blistering heat wave upon his new home, Earth, and fry all the humans like chicken parts.</p><p>“No hard feelings, eh?”</p><p>Sol’s Flare erupted and took a swipe at him. Lucifer screeched, threw himself out of the way. He escaped, only a few singed feathers smoking.</p><p>And now?</p><p>Below him, the blue aggie marble of Earth called to him, singing: the water-swish of her oceans, the rumble-grumble of her mountains, the stop-go-elide-and-slide of all the tongues of humanity. Go straight away, or…?</p><p>Sadly, only Celestials could fully appreciate Music. Only Celestials could fully appreciate his talents. Would his brothers and sisters not soften their hearts if he played for them? Would they not see that he was merely a brother who thought a bit differently from them? He meant them no harm—he’d <em>never</em> meant them any harm. Would they not believe that truth if they heard his Music once again?</p><p>High above the wobbling Earth, he curled up atop his piano and napped, tuckered out.</p><p>***</p><p>“Sorry, darling, I know this is most undignified, but it’s the easiest way to carry you right now.”</p><p>He eased the piano onto her back, clutched a leg, and flew to the Spiked Iron Gate of Issachar.</p><p>“Uriel! Dearie me, Ray-Ray can pitch better than you with one wing tied behind her back. You nearly turned my piano into kindling! Not to mention, Sol’s consuming its Divinity would’ve detonated a supernova, destroying the humans. Wouldn’t Dad have been cheesed off then!”</p><p>The Gate of Issachar slammed closed.</p><p>“Fine, nice talking to you, too. See you at Armageddon.”</p><p>One hand still clutching the piano leg, Lucifer slid his other hand under the case and turned his piano right-side-up. He set her on the cirrus. He pulled up a puffy cumulus and took a seat. For a moment, he rested his fingers on the piano’s rosewood fallboard.</p><p>
  <em>If I haven’t said it before, hello, old friend.</em>
</p><p>From behind the Gate, a faint murmur of noise rolled toward him.</p><p>Lucifer’s grip nearly dented the rosewood. <em>Now</em> what?</p><p>Footsteps. Many, many footsteps, as soft as wind rustling through bulrushes. Whispers. Many, many whispers, like raindrops pattering through a weeping willow’s branches. A few whispers of <em>Samael</em>, a few whispers of <em>Our Fallen Brother</em>, and many, many more whispers of <em>Traitor</em>.</p><p>Lucifer swallowed, the click in his throat audible. Definitely not the adoring crowd of his youthful recital days.</p><p>He lifted the fallboard and positioned his feet at the pedals. He rubbed moist fingers along his thighs. He inhaled a long breath (<em>one…two…three…</em>) and exhaled a long breath (<em>three…two…one…</em>)<em>.</em> His heartbeat bumped beneath his ribcage. Sweat dampened his collar. Time seemed to move ever more slowly, each moment taking an eternity to pass, one moment into the other…</p><p>He lifted his hands to the keys.</p><p>An urge surged through him, a <em>want</em>, a <em>desire</em>—</p><p>His fingers touched down on the ivories. They tremored there, no notes sounding. As if he were like a blind man who’d forgotten Braille. Could he play, really play? After all these eons?</p><p>He closed his eyes. His fingers found different keys. His fingers pressed, and moved, and, hesitantly at first, he was playing, and then, more boldly, he was playing, and then—</p><p>Divinity snatched hold of his fingers!</p><p>And She weaved the notes into melodies far more intricate, far more expressive than anything he himself could create. For he was merely—merely?—Music’s perfect conduit.</p><p>Of course! How could he have doubted himself? He was Lucifer Bloody Morningstar, Dad-dammit, and only one pianist he’d ever given tips to, Horowitz—good old mad-sad Vlad—had ever come to close to outshining the Morning Star. And come Vlad had. Many, many times. You’re welcome, Vladdie! Are you keeping the putzes in the Silver City entertained?</p><p>He bent his head to the keys. And the Immortal Music flowed through him, and the notes were his blood, and the beat his heartbeat, and the Music pulsed through him and out through his fingertips and onto the keys in sparks of light and color, like flames leaping atop fireplace logs, reds and golds and blues, swirling into melodic whorls, spiraling up into the ether, floating away. Yes! How he’d missed this! How he <em>wanted</em> this! At any moment, his body itself might lift and soar alongside the notes, no wings needed.</p><p>He swayed to the sounds and colors, he swayed his body over the keyboard, and he thundered out deep-purple double-fortissimos, and he caressed the keys with delicate pink pianissimos, and—</p><p>Out of the corner of his eye, Lucifer glimpsed the Wall lambing-up, glimpsed the thousands of peacock eyes spudding.</p><p>He took his fingers from the keys. A final, golden half-tone still rang through the air, a note yearning for completion, a completion it could not attain. Eventually, the note died away, echoing from cloud to cloud and flowing into the ether, becoming eternal Universe. The Universe of All Possibilities. And for the first time in his Immortal life, he understood, perhaps, the words, “And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very, very good.”</p><p>A smile stole over Lucifer’s lips, a smile as soft as the first rays of dawn on the First Morning. Surely his siblings must share in his delight?</p><p>Lucifer roamed his gaze over the Wall.</p><p>There, Dagiel, once a playmate and the Angel who held dominion over fish. (“Come play Sharks and Minnows with us, Sam!” she’d cry, and dive under the Ocean’s waves, always, always eluding capture by the sharks.) Now her eyes were as flat in expression as a carp’s.</p><p>There, Zophiel, once a Rebel like him. (“Victory is ours, Samael. I swear to you my eternal allegiance.”) Now his spying little eyes brimmed with suspicion and stupidity.</p><p>There, front and center, Michael, once his most beloved older brother, who’d taught string-bean Samael tricks for fighting stronger opponents. (“Use your speed, your agility—no one’s quicker than you, Lightbringer”; “Dodge, and then use their momentum against them, a push, a kick”; “The nuts, the knees, the nose—make the filthy demons howl, Sammy!”) Now Michael’s eyes glittered like poisoned gems.</p><p>All of them, <em>all</em> of them, unmoved.</p><p>A hot rush of blood flooded down from Lucifer’s brain. His head whirled in a swirl of dizzy waves, and the peacock eyes zoomed far away, as if they were tunneling down the wrong end of Nanael’s telescope. <em>No, don’t faint, don’t faint. </em>He snagged hold of the piano’s rim to keep from falling off the cloud-bench.</p><p>He bent forward in his seat, still clinging to the piano. He blinked. Blinked again. <em>No.</em> <em>No. I must not have seen right. Or, or, I haven’t played yet. I only imagined playing, and they have yet to hear me—</em></p><p>But all those notes, the deep-purple double-fortissimos, the delicate pink pianissimos, the golden half-tones, came crashing down from Heaven’s Sky like nine hundred tons of scrap metal and shattered his heart.</p><p>He sat there, hunched, frozen—soul frozen, blood frozen, every muscle frozen, his hand clenched to the rosewood. Not a sound from his siblings. Not a sound from the City. The perfect, sky-blue Sky sailed overhead, indifferent.</p><p>At last, he took a shuddering breath. Hauled himself straight. Touched a finger to middle C. He didn’t play. Didn’t try to win them over with azure-violet-green arpeggios and sharps the scarlet of clanging bells. With shimmering rainbow octaves racing out from the hidey-holes of his mind and vanishing through his keyboard-racing fingers as quickly as fleeting thoughts.</p><p>His siblings would never be won over. Never. Not even if from each shattered fragment of his heart another Universe sprang forth, each glimmering with the Sacred and the Holy, each bursting into Divine Song.</p><p>Especially not then. Sin of Pride and all that.</p><p>He laughed, the harsh sound scraping his throat. How ironic. Turned out that, deep down, he’d desired their…</p><p><em>Damn</em> them.</p><p>He shot to his feet and stalked toward the Peacock Wall, whisking his hands at it, as if he could crumble the Wall with shooing gestures and shouts. “Go on, all of you—be Angels, won’t you, and <em>flap off!</em>”</p><p>He turned his back on all his siblings. He stripped naked, dropping shoes and cast-offs onto the cloud-bench. The Scent of Heaven—lily-like, impossible to scrub out, and, as was the way with smells, a conjurer of memories—tainted those clothes. They were no longer his.</p><p>From the Earth package, he took out a safety harness and two heavy-duty moving straps. He slipped into the harness and wrapped the straps around the piano case.</p><p>“This’ll be more comfortable for you, darling—no more of that upside-down travel. C’mon, we’re going home.”</p><p>He clipped the straps to the harness’s chest carabiner.</p><p>
  <em>Ready. Set. Go!</em>
</p><p>He whooshed open his wings and swooped from his cloud-perch, the piano swaying in the ether fifteen feet below him. With wings spread wide wide wide—the widest wingspan of all Dad’s children—he glided across the universe. Every now and again, he flapped a leisurely stroke, skimming along at close to the speed of light. And he listened, and he felt, and he watched, carefully, committing everything to memory: the Music of the Spheres hummed to him, delicately, as if thousands of invisible, moistened fingers were rubbing the rims of partially filled wine glasses; the ether tickled his skin with temperatures either fiercely hot or fiercely cold, depending on his nearness to a star; all the stars redshifted and blueshifted around him, if not as crazily as during his mad dash toward Sol.</p><p>Occasionally, he stopped to admire a view. A hot, young spiral galaxy belching out blazing, bright new stars. A supermassive black hole snacking on odds and bobs as if they were tasty grapes and plums. An old star exploding, sending up a pink cloud of dust.</p><p>At the edge of Sol’s System, he turned, hovering. He threw his arms wide.</p><p>“Attention! Stars, galaxies, nebulae, superclusters, and, especially you, my dear brothers and sisters—I present my new self!” He snapped off a salute. “So long, God’s little bitches!”</p><p>He spun and dove for Earth, and her blues and greens and browns swam closer, closer, until he could make out the details of the North American continent: the snow-capped Rockies, the snaking Mississippi, the Great Lakes, Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. He pierced Earth’s atmosphere and tucked his wings tight to his sides, the piano kiting behind him.</p><p>He torpedoed downward.</p><p>A brisk wind grabbed at his skin. Raked his hair. Screeched in his ears. He raced ever faster. Raced toward the open-armed Land of the Free. Raced toward the sparkly fractal art of L.A.’s night lights. Raced toward that dazzling jewel, Lux.</p><p>Three gees.</p><p>Nine—</p><p>Fifteen—</p><p>Screech of the wind turning to roar.</p><p>Spots dancing before eyes.</p><p>Tempting blackout.</p><p>Down.</p><p>Down.</p><p>Down.</p><p>One last teeth-rattling, molecule-jolting, dimension-cracking thrill ride for the Lightbringer.</p></div>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. And Then He Burned</h2></a>
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<p></p><div class="hero"><h1>REBELLION</h1><p>
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  </p></div><p>Lucifer trudged along the sands of a lonely beach off the Pacific Coast Highway. Hours ago, fiery Sol, spent for the day, had dived below the waters, and now a black-waved ocean wriggled beside him. Salt and seaweed smells punctured the air. Thunder muttered in the distance, at the horizon, where endless ocean joined interminable sky.</p><p>Mazikeen sauntered at his side, glaring at the waves as if she might leap upon them and stab them into submission—if only she could brave wading into the strange liquid. “Lucifer, we’ve been galumphing about for miles, and you haven’t said two words. I’m cold, I’m drenched from that spray stuff”—a quick wave of her hand from the galloping surf to her doublet—“so why the hell are we here?”</p><p>“Because I hate the beach.”</p><p>Her eyebrow, the one scissored by a now-imperceptible scar, cocked, and her mouth twisted, ready to fire off a snark. Likely along the lines of, “So, today is a day for frolicking off to places you hate?” Earlier, once again, she’d bashed him for his “dumbass” trip to Heaven, daring to show his face at the Gates for the “idiot” reason of collecting his “music-thingy.”</p><p>Demons. Couldn’t live with them, couldn’t live without them.</p><p>But for once, she must’ve caught his mood, for instead of smacking his arm or wising off, she threw glances about the beach as if a saner answer might loom up out of the gloom.</p><p>“I don’t get it.”</p><p>Black boulders lay scattered on the sand like tourmaline gems strewn from a giant’s broken necklace, and Lucifer strode to the largest, twice as tall as he, its jagged surface streaked through with blood-red quartz. He leapt atop it, flung his arms wide.</p><p>“Behold, Mazikeen, the Beach of Eternal Mercies! And there”—he swept a hand toward the steep, two-hundred-foot cliffs soaring above them—“the Bluffs of Sorrow-No-More! And here”—he jabbed a forefinger downward—“the Rock of, the Rock of…”</p><p>Gabriel’s Trumpet blared forth in his mind, a call to battle. The battle in the Silver City, eons ago…</p><p> </p><p>Tubas oompahed, trumpets bebopped, snare drums rat-a-tat-tatted: the angelic jazz band, Heaven’s Hot Licks, strutted down Jubilation Avenue, swinging their instruments from side to side, slapping out “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the white plumes of their hats bouncing to the beat. Samael, air-guitaring and singing, tried to blend in amidst the brass and sticks, but a surge of Angels cut through the ranks and swept him away. They mobbed him, some cheering, more booing, all of them clutching at his robes—and his best robes too, dazzling white pants and shirt and a flame-orange vest!</p><p>“Let go! For Dad’s sake, I just had this cleaned! This is <em>exactly</em> what I was trying to avoid.”</p><p>Two of Samael’s Rebels, Asmoday of the Three Heads (a bull, a ram, and a raven) and Ornias The Shapeshifter (she morphed from six-foot slimy frog to spiky-haired, nose-ringed girl), pushed through the throng and flanked him. With Ornias hopping and sashaying and Asmoday threatening to gore, butt, or peck any obstructers, they inched their way into the Town Piazza. There, at the heart of the Silver City, a bed of Rebel-planted roses, jasmines, and carnations perfumed the air. A Rebel-constructed fountain, seven spigots spouting, gurgled gaily. A Rebel-erected dais popped with colors, its festoons of flame-orange marigolds and purply ribbons and yellowy balloons fluttering in the breeze.</p><p>Samael leapt atop the dais. Behind him, the Grand Assembly Hall, all silver and glass, sparkled in Dad’s Light, its spire, a swirl of diamonds of silver-blue, reaching for—touching?—Heaven’s heavens; before him, a multicolored sea of Angels roiled and seethed. His Rebels—Asmoday, Ornias, Balam, and thirty-odd others—ringed the platform.</p><p>Today, at this rally, he would get his message across! Today, he would win them all to his side! And then, they’d present themselves to Dad as a united front, and He’d <em>have</em> to bend.</p><p>Samael strode to the microphone. The “Saints” music ceased. The crowd hushed to a fitful silence. Samael flung his arms wide.</p><p>“O Brothers and Sisters, listen to me! It’s time—it’s long <em>past</em> time—to assert our rights! Let us—”</p><p>Hisses and jeers and shouts of “Blasphemy!” slapped his face. A rock the size of a yoga ball sped toward his head. He ducked. An Assembly Hall window shattered, and glass shards pelted his back. Why wouldn’t they ever listen? Why couldn’t they see they were marionettes danced about by Dad’s Divine Plan? If they’d only listen, he’d help them cut their strings!</p><p>How could his siblings not want that? How could they not want something more? True, he couldn’t verbalize all his wants, but something more existed, he knew it! Humans held the key. They had to! Whenever he thought of them, a little thrill twanged his wiring, a little flutter quivered his wings, his body crying, “Yes! Let’s fly down to them!” How he ached to frolic amidst their wants! If he could explore <em>their</em> wants, he could figure out what these vague stirrings within him meant. He could finally, <em>finally,</em> scratch his itch!</p><p>“Please,” he said, lifting his hands and patting the air to quiet the catcalls.</p><p>At the rear of the crowd, a kerfuffle. Its source: meddling Amenadiel, his face bunched up into his “hilarious” angry face, as little sister Ray-Ray called it. Only, The Firstborn’s stance—his fists clenched down at his sides, his body clenched tight as a fist—would likely have more Angels wetting their undies than snickering. A handful of Samael’s Rebels broke formation and crept away. Band members scattered, drumsticks and tubas clattering to the cloud-ground. <em>Come back,</em> Samael wanted to call to them. <em>He’s just a junkheap of scowls and platitudes, nothing to be afraid of.</em></p><p>Amenadiel stalked forward, thrusting siblings out of his way right and left. The sea of Angels, forty bodies deep, moiled and murmured, elbows jostling, craniums craning, brothers and sisters straining to pinpoint the disturbance.</p><p>And then the sea parted for Amenadiel like two great Ocean waves rolling aside.</p><p>Samael flipped up a palm to stop the onslaught that was the Firstborn. “Brother, hear me out.”</p><p>Balam slithered into Amenadiel’s path and rattled his serpent’s tail.</p><p>Amenadiel socked him on his scaly jaw.</p><p>Asmoday bounced over and butted Amenadiel.</p><p>“Brothers!” Samael cried.</p><p>Rahmiel, the fat Angel of Love, slugged Asmoday’s bird brain.</p><p>She-wolves Shax and Shoftiel growled and sank their fangs into each other’s scruff.</p><p>“Sisters!” Samael cried.</p><p>Angels hooted and halloed and placed bets on their favorite warriors.</p><p>“Hello, hello, anybody!” Samael cried. “Carnival Day is <em>next</em> month!” He tapped the microphone. Was this thing working?</p><p>More and more Angels whopped each other. Shrieks and laughs. Bellows and taunts. Oh, for crying out loud, of course Amenadiel would churn his peaceful assembly into a melee!</p><p>Well, bring it on.</p><p>Samael jumped off the dais and sprinted toward Amenadiel—</p><p>A furious shout. A rush of movement. Samael whirled about. Too late! Wiry Rahatiel, his four muscled arms as hard as cudgels, whipped through the crowd and plowed into Samael’s middle. Samael and Rahatiel crashed to the cloud. They scuffled, Rahatiel on top, Rahatiel’s flying fists thwacking Samael’s face, Samael snatching at Rahatiel’s four wrists—</p><p>“Foolish boy,” Rahatiel’s two stacked mouths spat.</p><p>“Fools rush in, eh?” Samael’s one mouth grinned.</p><p>A two-handed right cracked across Samael’s chin. His head snapped back, and pain daggered into his skull, redly, blackly, sharply…</p><p>Distant yells… Distant thuds… Distant groans… Noises were scurrying about in the far nooks and crannies of his mind…</p><p>Wait, that groaning. Not so distant. <em>His</em> groaning?</p><p>A double swat to his cheek.</p><p>“Wakey, wakey,” Rahatiel trilled, his falsetto voice a tick behind his bass. “Don’t make this so easy.” The sleeves of Rahatiel’s silk kimono flapped with his repeated slaps.</p><p>Red and black sparkles danced through Samael’s head.</p><p>Healer Raphael and Vaphula the Ass vaulted forward, ganging up on Samael. Raphael’s rod, the serpenty asklepian, smacked his ribs. Vaphael’s feet donkey-kicked his legs. Samael yipped and yelped.</p><p>“No fair, no fair! I call Angel Rules: one-on-one!”</p><p>Asmoday and Ornias scrambled to Samael’s aid. Asmoday’s bull-head gored Raphael in the crotch. Ornias morphed into a Phantasmal Poison Frog and squirted venom in Vaphula’s eye. Rafe spilled to the dirt. Vaf keeled over, donkey legs wheeling in the air.</p><p>“Serves you right, Rafe!” Samael called, still stuck beneath Rahatiel. He slammed his palm into Rahatiel’s nose. Rahatiel merely blinked. “Some healer you are!”</p><p>Samael snagged hold of two of Rahatiel’s wrists and bucked and squirmed but couldn’t dislodge him.</p><p>“Hey, Ra-san, shouldn’t you let me up now?”</p><p>“You think this is a training session, Sammy?” Rahatiel’s hot little eyes flashed. “You never shut up about your ‘Bill of Angel Rights,’ and now I’m going to <em>train</em> you black and blue and shut you up permanently.”</p><p>Wait. A training session—</p><p>Samael crunched his abs, jerked his torso upright, threw his arms around Rahatiel, bear-hugging him, like bear-hugging chiseled granite. He shoved off with a foot, rolling to the side, throwing Rahatiel off him, throwing Rahatiel beneath him (<em>Rely on leverage, </em>Michael had taught him—and he’d almost forgotten the lesson). He clobbered Rahatiel a good one, to the jaw.</p><p>“Ding dong, you’re out!”</p><p>Samael sprang to his feet.</p><p>All around him, Angels jabbed, Angels grappled, Angels tore at the dais and toppled it to the ground.</p><p>A riot! An honest-to-Dad riot! Samael whooped and hollered. Now, <em>this</em> was Heaven, all the Goody Two-Shoes letting loose!</p><p>Om-chanter Chayyliel, “Skinny Bones,” attacked him, got in a few good licks, Cha’s bones practically clattering with each landed blow. Samael thumped Cha with blows of his own. (<em>Dodge, and then use their momentum against them, a push, a kick</em>, Michael had taught him. <em>Use your speed, your agility—no one’s quicker than you, Lightbringer</em>. <em>Seize any opening—Bam! Get in and get out. The nuts, the knees, the nose—make them howl, Sammy.)</em></p><p>“Go meditate on <em>this, </em>Cha-Cha!”</p><p>Samael kicked Cha in his second chakra. Cha doubled over, and Samael grabbed fistfuls of Cha’s ocher swami robes and chucked him into the dais’s debris. A cloud of dust and wood fragments bloomed.</p><p>“Ommm, we’re all one, and you’re out too!”</p><p>Gabriel blew his horn. But why? Because of a little bro-and-sis squabble? Gabe was tooting away as if Good were battling Evil!</p><p>Inch by contested inch, minute by everlasting minute, Michael, Amenadiel, Barakiel, and a Heavenly host of others drove the Rebels from the City Center. Down the silver-cobbled Jubilation Avenue. Past all the shops, past all the restaurants. To the outskirts of the City. Past the City Limits. Onto the Beach of Eternal Mercies. Toward the Bluffs of Sorrow-No-More.</p><p>Splashing through tide pools.</p><p>Slipping on seaweed.</p><p>Tripping over rocks.</p><p>They fought—oh, how they fought. But no Divine weapons, no battling wings, for wielding God’s gifts against a sibling was unthinkable.</p><p>More of Samael’s soldiers fell—Ahriman, Balam, Baliel, Molloch.</p><p>Bones broke.</p><p>Blood spurted.</p><p>Hearts faltered.</p><p>Back, the Rebels were pressed back. Behind them, the two-hundred-foot-high Bluffs loomed. Beside them, the endless, Ineffable Ocean swooshed in seven-foot waves.</p><p>Samael clocked Camael, the one-winged Angel of Dreams, with a nifty uppercut, dropping him on his angelic butt. He snagged Haniel by his fiery hart tail and slung him onto Uzziel’s unicorn horn. He dodged Rogziel’s swishing tentacles and darted past Saleos’s croc jaws. His goal: the Rock of Justice Tempered, far up on the Beach, nestled in the lee of the Bluffs.</p><p>He would leap its great height, survey the battle, direct his soldiers—!</p><p>Valefor, gorilla-limbed, lion-bodied, streaked toward him, a blur of hairy arms and tawny tail and coppery-red loincloth.</p><p>
  <em>Oh, crap, run!</em>
</p><p>Val belted him.</p><p>Fifty yards, Samael sailed. He smacked into the Rock. Bounced off. Spilled onto the fine white sand with a whump.</p><p>A <em>snap!</em> Like a celery stick snapped in two. His rib. Or three.</p><p>“Ow.” <em>Well, at least that method of travel got me here quicker.</em></p><p>Samael swayed upright. Zigzagged a step or two.</p><p>Ape Limbs knuckle-galumphed over and popped a crisp right to Samael’s gut.</p><p>Gah! An explosion inside his chest as if Val had smashed twin battering rams into his lungs, all his breath blasting out of him. He gulped for air, snatched only a bite. He tottered a step, another step, the sand beneath him heaving and dipping. <em>Must get away, must—</em></p><p>Val snarled, a bestial growl that rolled through Samael’s bones, prickled the hairs on his skin, sent jumps and shivers up and down his legs. <em>Move!</em> <em>Must get away, must—</em></p><p>Valefor bounded in front of him, his mane, thick, shaggy, coppery-red, swinging along his sinewy shoulders. Val bared four-inch canines. “Keep moving, Sammy. I <em>love</em> to play with prey.”</p><p>Samael hunched, gasping, cradling his ribs with aching hands. “V-val! G-give a brother a moment to catch his—”</p><p>Seven-foot Val unleashed a blistering left.</p><p>Samael’s hips hurled him right, panic—blood-rush-y, muscle-skittery—blasting through his circuitry. Val’s punch glanced off his jaw, staggered him. His coordination vamoosed, his strength sapped, he slugged wildly, as if he’d sprouted Rogziel’s twelve rubbery tentacles. A flurry of his punches whiffed by, as damaging as air kisses, but he socked a few solid: a right to the liver, a hook to a whiskery cheek, a combo to cat eyes, a—</p><p>Val plugged him, a jackhammer shot to his cracked ribs.</p><p>A scream rushed up from Samael’s belly, tears streaming from his eyes, his knees turning as wobbly as Slinkys and careening him away.</p><p>Val plucked him up and body-slammed him to the ground.</p><p>Samael sprawled, one of Ray-Ray’s rag dolls. Electrical tingles shot along his spine. Down to his fingertips. Down to his feet. Up to the top of his skull.</p><p>“That all you got, Favorite Brat?”</p><p>“Knuh…” Samael gathered his shattered breaths and willed the words into a fist, willed the words to wallop Val. “Knuckl’ draggr.”</p><p>A <em>woof!</em>—short, sharp, laced with lion-laughter. “Gonna be fun, Sammy, hauling your whupped ass before Dad. <em>Rabble-rouser.</em>”</p><p>Samael dug his fingers and heels into the sand, pushed his body along the Beach like a broken-backed crab, pushed away from Val—</p><p>Val strode to him, dropped atop him in a straddle, reached for his throat. To throttle him?</p><p>Gorilla palms—muscular, leathery, scarred by demon fights—closed around Samael’s windpipe. They squeezed, squeezed, cat-playing with him, cat-playing with him, for Val could snap his bones like chicken necks, could crush his flesh into tomato pulp—</p><p>
  <em>Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe!</em>
</p><p>Samael flailed—</p><p>
  <em>No, use leverage!</em>
</p><p>He gripped gorilla arms, arched his hips, pushed with planted feet, twisted his body—and Val budged not—</p><p>
  <em>No, no, no, can’t let him win, can’t lose my Rebellion—</em>
</p><p>He cuffed lion ribs, clawed the gorilla fingers noosing his neck, his heart bolting, his body thrashing—</p><p>Cuffing, clawing, cuffing, clawing, <em>no no no no—</em></p><p>His struggles growing feebler, blackness flaring at the edges of his vision, flooding inward, crawling over the lenses of his eyes—</p><p>
  <em>Don’t faint don’t faint don’t fai—</em>
</p><p>But his arms flopped to the ground, and one hit a hard—</p><p>A six-inch-thick driftwood log.</p><p><em>Yes!</em> With a rush of energy, Samael flung near-numb fingers around it, nabbed it, cracked it against Val’s temple.</p><p>Valefor fell atop him like a four-hundred-pound furry halo. Valefor, Angel of Secrets and Vengeance, moved no more.</p><p>
  <em>And the lion sleeps tonight.</em>
</p><p>Samael’s heart jackrabbited inside his ribs. His lungs hitched, hitched again, sucking for Ocean air, tangy and seaweed-sharp—but his throat had constricted to the diameter of a straw… And Val’s crushing weight… He tasted the color crimson—blood—and the sand grit filming his tongue. His muscles burned. Too much, too much fighting… And Val’s body warmth seeping through his clothing to his flesh… He was spent. For the rest of Eternity, he’d lie here on the scratchy sand like an arrow-struck bird—</p><p>
  <em>Get up, get up, claim victory! And then, we’ll all make up and celebrate with singing and merrymaking, bragging to each other about our stamina and prowess!</em>
</p><p>Samael wriggled out from underneath sweat-stinky, peppermint-candy-stinky Val and teetered up on quivery legs. He thrust his arms to the sky and spun for all his siblings to see.</p><p>“I am Samael, the Undefeat—!”</p><p>He stumbled, his feet tangling with each other, his gaze tangling on the sights around him.</p><p>
  <em>Oh, dear Dad. Dear, dear Dad.</em>
</p><p>His Rebels, save for a handful, strewed the shore like shattered seashells. The Opposition, save for a thrice handful, strewed the shore like shattered seashells.</p><p>A hundred of his brothers and sisters lay broken.</p><p>Broken.</p><p>Broken, their arms and legs twitching and twisted, their Divine blood staining the white sand scarlet. Broken, their ruined mouths moaning or weeping or pleading for a brother’s or sister’s aid. Strange: during the fury of the fight, few of the sights that must’ve ached Dad’s All-Seeing Eyes, few of the sounds that must’ve throbbed Dad’s All-Hearing Ears, had trampled upon his own adrenaline-tunneled, adrenaline-cottoned senses.</p><p>“Sorry,” Samael whispered. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for…”</p><p>Ocean waves shivered. Flies buzzed amongst the wounded. Drifts of white clouds crouched overhead.</p><p>Along the Beach, the Opposers quashed his remaining Rebels, forcing them to kneel and standing guard over them. Amenadiel and Michael, Dad’s two mightiest warriors, raced toward him, splashing through a shallow tide pool, hermit crabs scurrying out of their way. Samael stayed put. Where could he go?</p><p>They cornered him at the Rock. A memory slid through his mind: Amenadiel scooping him up and carrying him for miles to put him to bed, when, as a young Angel, he’d tired himself out with a busy day at playing and fallen asleep wherever—curled up in his boulder fort on the Beach, waves <em>hushsh-</em>ing; cradled in Forest branches, owls<em> who?-</em>ing; nested in Mountain meadow clover, frogs <em>bic-bic-bick-</em>ing<em>.</em></p><p>Grumpy Pants stepped forward. Grains of wet sand and coils of red seaweed clung to the now-raggedy hems of The Firstborn’s black, flowing trousers. Two of the fasteners on his gray-and-silver tunic dangled—one missing a hook, the other an eye—and the seams under an arm and at the neck were a ravel of rips, so that the tunic hung at half-mast on his discus-thrower shoulders. His right eye had swollen closed into a black and purple bulge. A two-inch gash on his forehead trickled blood.</p><p>And yet, he didn’t boast nearly the damage Samael did. He probed his face with shaky fingertips. A pulpy ruin. His knuckles? A torn mess. His torso? A finger-painting of red, purple, green, and golden-brown bruises. His collarbone? Pretty sure it, along with the ribs, was broken—a sharp, bright pain stabbed him every time he breathed.</p><p>And his beautiful clothes, now bloodstained tatters and shreds!</p><p>“Good fight, eh?” Samael ventured a smile, but it kept quivering.</p><p>Michael, the Golden One, his gold-and-scarlet robes somehow still undirtied, lunged—</p><p>Amenadiel lunged—</p><p>Samael threw his arms up about his head, lifted a knee, folded in on himself, trying to protect his soft parts—</p><p>No beating. Amenadiel hooked Michael’s elbow, pulled Michael back, kept hold.</p><p>His shoulders hunched, his insides scrambling together, Samael showed his open palms to God’s Mightiest, a sort of “C’mon, let’s all chill” gesture. “Mikey—”</p><p>Michael’s eyes, the greenish blue of robin eggs, flashed a look at Samael’s hands as if Samael were offering him dog shit. “You’re poison, Samael.”</p><p>Samael’s hands stumbled to his gut, Michael’s words a sucker punch.</p><p>Michael punched more words quick-fire. “You’ve betrayed me. You’ve betrayed all of us who loved you best.”</p><p>“I haven’t—!”</p><p>“We told you not to hold your rally—and look what happened!”</p><p>Samael stamped his feet, his fists rat-a-tat-tatting against his forehead, unable to stop himself, even though Michael would tell him he was being a child. “Amenadiel threw the first punch! And I <em>never</em> wanted this!” Samael swept his hand round the Beach, over his crumpled, wrecked siblings. “I wanted you to listen! And, and, you can’t stop me from speaking out!”</p><p>“We <em>will </em>stop you, always.”</p><p>Samael gripped his hair, pulled it into clumps, would’ve given mighty Michael a good shake if he’d dared. “<em>Why?</em> What are you so afraid of?”</p><p>Michael surged against Amenadiel’s grip, and his scar, a jagged, demon-inflicted scar snaking down his face from lower left eyelid to jaw, reddened. “I fear nothing. But <em>you</em> should.”</p><p>“Oh, please—”</p><p>“Father created us to carry out His Will. We are to obey His Word—and that’s it! Not go gallivanting off to do our own thing! And certainly not to urge others to do likewise.” Michael drew himself up, breathing like a snorting, pawing Celestial Bull. “I will enforce that.”</p><p>“No! You don’t get to decide what’s best for us all!”</p><p>The Bull thrust his body forward, as if to charge. But Amenadiel held tight. “That’s my Divine prerogative! Get that through your knucklebrain. And you”—Michael skewered Amenadiel with a pissed-off look—“unhand me.”</p><p>Amenadiel’s jaw clenched tight enough to crack Divine titanium. But he released Michael.</p><p>Michael spun on his heel, stalked away, his gold-and-scarlet boots slapping the sand, the tiny scarlet bells woven into his golden braid jangling, sharply, chiming condemnation. “If I look at him, I’m going to pulverize him,” Michael threw over his shoulder. “You handle him, Amenadiel.”</p><p>Samael smoothed his hands over his hair, smoothed them down his soiled and tattered vest. He pressed them to his heart as if that could soothe and smooth it, too. He flickered another smile at Amenadiel. “Dearie me, ole ‘Who is Like God?’ certainly has his breeches in a twist—”</p><p>Amenadiel seized Samael by his vest, yanked Samael to him.</p><p>“Hey, let go!” Samael twisted; a <em>sccrrrich:</em> the vest tore at the seams and ripped right off his chest. “Now look what you’ve done!”</p><p>Amenadiel clasped the cloth in an upraised fist like a silky, flame-orange victory pennant. “You think everything’s a game, don’t you, Samael? Well, game this: Surrender. Give up your foolishness and pursue it no more.” He hurled the cloth away. “<em>Vow it!</em>”</p><p>Samael jumped, startled, as startled as if Amenadiel had bitten his ear.</p><p>A vow? A <em>vow? </em>A promise Amenadiel knew he’d never break? And his desire not to have every last little aspect of his life controlled by His Will <em>wasn’t</em> foolishness. Oh, yes, Amenadiel would believe it was, for Amenadiel thought him wild, erratic, defiant, a boy of fire to Amenadiel’s iron.</p><p>Amenadiel, always the responsible one, always trying to daddy them, always binding himself in mental chains to hold himself hostage to Dad’s True Way.</p><p>Samael took a step back. “No.”</p><p>“You will pay for your stubbornness, Samael,” Amenadiel said.</p><p>“I’m not stubborn,” Samael said, thrusting out his chin. “I’m determined. I know what I want, and I go for it.”</p><p>A mistake. His chin a magnet, Amenadiel’s iron knuckles clouted him, spinning him around impossibly fast, knocking him right out of his sandals. Samael clutched at the Rock to keep from crumpling to the sand. He clung to it, on his knees, the sand slipping beneath his scrabbling toes.</p><p>“Thou shalt not want!” Amenadiel gripped Samael by the hair and bashed his face into the Rock.</p><p>A dull <em>thunk</em>, inside his head. And then a <em>whshshing</em> whirred, like Ocean waves tossing inside a seashell. The sand snickered at him as he slid down the Rock to meet it—</p><p>No. No! He would not let Amenadiel claim to have defeated him. Even if Amenadiel ripped out his entrails, paraded them around the City, and splattered them onto the Gates for the crows, somehow, <em>somehow,</em> he would not let The Firstborn put him down for the count.</p><p>Samael grabbed at the Rock’s red-quartz jags. His head whirligigged. His guts flexed and brought up his breakfast of manna, banana, and sweet tea, the foul taste reaching back into his throat and gagging him again. Blood warm and sticky flowed from his nose, from a split lip, from a cut above his eye.</p><p>“<em>Thou shalt not want!</em>”</p><p>Amenadiel gripped Samael’s hair again, as if determined to bash Want out of him—</p><p>Samael twisted and struggled. With an elbow, he speared Amenadiel in the stomach, hard. Amenadiel grunted, lost his grip, reeled backward. Samael wrested himself upright.</p><p>
  <em>Run!</em>
</p><p>Samael’s wobbly legs didn’t much cooperate. One, two, three staggery steps—</p><p>He stopped. Nowhere to run. He dragged a sleeve across his mouth and nose to wipe away blood and puke. What was wrong with him? Why did he, alone, want? Even his followers didn’t truly get it, simply joining his cause so they could stick it to their elder siblings or so they could bask in his charisma while hoping that one day, one day, they too would understand his passion.</p><p>Only Amenadiel got it—kind of got it, maybe half got it—for Amenadiel told him he was like the humans, Amenadiel’s lips wrinkling on the word “humans” as if to spit.</p><p>Humans! Every day, he sought exit from Heaven to hang out with them. And every day, Dad’s Puppets would tell him that he was too immature, tell him that his powers, yet untested, would screw up the Divine works.</p><p>They had no right to control him. No right to keep him from Earth.</p><p>“But I <em>do</em> want!” Samael said.</p><p>Amenadiel rushed him, fists cocked, feet kicking up whirlwinds of sand behind him—</p><p>Samael flung his arms wide. “Go ahead, Brother! Burst my flesh! Splinter my bones! Spill my blood, all of it! But know this: Always, <em>always,</em> I will want. I <em>want! </em>And so shall others—”</p><p>The World darkened.</p><p>Amenadiel braked.</p><p>Samael shot his hands to his eyes.</p><p>Amenadiel shot his hands to his eyes.</p><p>All around them, their siblings pawed at their eyes, babbles of fear on their tongues.</p><p>Had…had Dad struck all of them near-blind?</p><p>Something—a scuttle of a cloud? a flutter of breeze amongst the palm trees?—drew Samael’s gaze upward. “Look!”</p><p>For the first time in Forever, the Sky, the always, always sky-blue Sky, with always, always white, puffy clouds, had darkened. On the horizon, where Ocean skimmed Sky, a horrible <em>something </em>lumbered up from Non-Existence. The, the <span class="nowrap">something—</span>a <span class="nowrap">cloud?—</span>black, shaped like an anvil, but an immense anvil, obliterated nearly all of the curved plane of the far Western Sky: the anvil’s base stretched the horizon’s entire width and its throat curved miles and miles and miles upward, all the way from the Ocean’s surface to the vault of Heaven, a height only reachable by Dad—and maybe not even by Him. The monstrous Anvil, too solid to be vapor, too vaporous to be solid, hunkered there and glowered.</p><p>Samael pressed his back against the Rock, would’ve shoved his molecules through it if he could’ve. “Br-brother,”—his words came out in a tumble—“what’s wrong with the Sky?”</p><p>More clouds, lower-lying clouds, evil with gray, roiled up from Non-Being and seethed at the Anvil’s feet.</p><p>Samael clutched Amenadiel’s arm, pulled Amenadiel to him. Amenadiel’s body was reassuringly solid, not yet faded into the growing dimness; Amenadiel’s muscles tensed as if to fight off the Anvil, protect all their siblings until the Anvil and its underlings crushed out the last ounce of his life.</p><p>“Brother,” Samael breathed, “those, those <em>things,</em> those underlings—Eremiel’s Demon Hounds.”</p><p>On camping trips, around campfires, Eremiel always scared them with tales of Demon Hounds who, at their cruel master’s behest, ripped out the throats of Angels and gobbled down their bodies and souls.</p><p>More and more of Samael’s brothers and sisters revived. They wavered to a stand. Steadied themselves with hands pressed to boulders or fingers wrapped around stone arches. They stared at the Demon Dogs. And trembled. <em>He</em> trembled. Fine tremors even passed over Amenadiel, and <em>nothing</em> ever frightened Amenadiel. If Samael had been younger, he might’ve clung to his big brother and hidden his face in his brother’s skirts.</p><p>Amenadiel wrenched his arm from Samael’s clutch. “Don’t be an idiot.”</p><p>“So th-they’re clouds? Real clouds? But how could they be—”</p><p>“Father.”</p><p>“Wh-what?”</p><p>“You’ve angered Father. Michael warned you—and yet, you continue to defy Divine Law!”</p><p>As if on an imperceptible Divine signal, the Anvil charged toward the Beach, shoving the roiling clouds before it—</p><p>The Angels all took a leap back, as if to escape the attack—</p><p>Wind, barren cold, huffed across the Ocean’s surface—its always, always blue but now oddly gray surface. The Wind snatched at them, shivered them. Samael’s tattered robes flapped in it, and he squinted against the salt-sea spray stinging his eyes, the sand grains flaying his skin, the stench—like rotting oysters?—smiting his nostrils. He snuck a peek directly upwards, his body traitorous, tipping slantwise, his hands curling at his chest.</p><p>He snapped straight, fiddled with the flame-orange trim on his ripped shirt cuffs, as if he were only trying to make himself more presentable for Dad—not cringing, no, never.</p><p>“Well, erm, at least we’ve finally gotten His atten—”</p><p>A sharp whap to Samael’s skull stumbled him sideways. He lost his legs. Couldn’t catch himself. His face slammed into the sand. Another rib or two crunched. A whimper dribbled out of him. For a moment, the thought rattled around in his head that Dad had struck him. But no, Dad’s Messenger Boy had taken it upon himself.</p><p>“You will not joke of this, Samael! Surrender before Him!”</p><p>Samael lurched to his hands and knees, planted a foot beneath him, swayed upright—</p><p>Collapsed to the sand as if Amenadiel’s blow had stolen his bones.</p><p>He tried again. Got his legs under him. Blood ran into his eyes. Gusts of Wind pummeled him, staggered him, but could not bowl him over. He held out a palm toward Amenadiel.</p><p>“Brother, please, I cannot.”</p><p>The Sky fell even darker, the furious heaps of shark-gray clouds scudding hither and thither. Ramming each other like clashing Titans. Rumbling at each other like falling slabs of mountain rock grinding against the Mountainside.</p><p>Amenadiel slapped Samael’s palm away. “Surrender, <em>now!</em>”</p><p>Samael pressed his hands together and raised them, and his eyes, to the Sky. “Father, give me my freedom! Give my followers their freedom! How bloody hard can that be for You?”</p><p>Amenadiel launched a brutal punch, targeting Samael’s unprotected gut, flattening him, again. “We exist to carry out His Divine Work, don’t you get it? That is our privilege!”</p><p>The Anvil rushed closer. Closer. To within ten miles of the Beach. Ever closer. Frighteningly near, as if, had they stood upon the peak of an Ocean wave, they could’ve touched their trembling fingers to its savage surface.</p><p>Fire erupted inside it—</p><p>Angels screamed. How could a cloud be on fire?</p><p>Bursts of flame ignited inside its thick, black smoke. The Anvil boomed, boomed again, the booms like ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand mallets pounding demonic kettledrums—</p><p>Angels clapped their hands to their ears and fell to their knees—</p><p>The Anvil spat a Fork of Fire out its throat, the World lighting up in its skull-white glow—</p><p>Angels shrieked to Dad, begged Him for Mercy—</p><p>The Fork zigzagged through the leaden Sky, branching, branching, a spindly, crackling Fire-Tree, piercing the shark-clouds, puncturing the Ocean—</p><p>The Ocean roared, climbed high, high, high, and higher still, fifty-foot waves, the gray of mud, crashing onto the shore, clawing for the Rock, breaking, thwarted, sweeping sand into the greedy Ocean’s mouth—</p><p>Angels cried for help, frothy waves slapping them, hurling throaty water-curses at them, yanking them out to sea like netted fish—</p><p><em>Brothers! Sisters!</em> In the Dim, the World fading, the horizon gone, all color bleeding away, Samael wobbled to his feet and ran. Fighting the Wind. Gripping his ribs. Blundering, half-sprinting, half-falling, with the cries of his brothers and sisters, his flailing brothers and sisters, pulling him along—</p><p>Amenadiel snared him by the back of his shirt, hauled him to the Rock, threw him against it.</p><p>“You will not move. This is all your fault.”</p><p>“But…”</p><p>Amenadiel refused to let him aid his siblings. Other Angels swam out and rescued bedraggled Angels from the berserk Ocean and pulled the still-unconscious Angels littering the shore to higher ground, while he could only wring his hands and watch their struggling strokes, their sputtering breaths, their—</p><p>“Surrender! Take the vow!”</p><p>Amenadiel cracked Samael across the face—a smack, another smack, harder, harder—latching onto Samael’s arm so that he would not fall and Amenadiel could hit him again and again. Amenadiel shoved his chest, and he stumbled back and whacked his head against the Rock. His knees softened, but he forced them straight.</p><p>“Samael! Give up! Look at what you’ve done!”</p><p>Seabirds, hundreds of them, dropped from the air.</p><p>Sea snakes, thousands of them, slithered ashore.</p><p>Coconut palms, <em>all</em> of them, thumped to the ground.</p><p>Fire-Fork after Fire-Fork after Fire-Fork sizzled through the Sky, hit the Bluffs, burst a copse of scrub bushes ablaze. Anvil Boom after Anvil Boom after Anvil Boom chased the Fire-Forks, shook loose Bluff rocks, whizzed the rocks past their heads, smashed the rocks down onto the sand. Enormous cracks, endlessly long, endlessly deep, gashed the ground and gulped sand and boulders and—</p><p>—And, nearly, frantic Angels.</p><p>His brothers and sisters scattered, like the Wind-hurled sand grains, like the flying logs of driftwood, like the burning palm fronds that winged through the air. But where was safety, chasms rupturing all around them?</p><p>The Rock.</p><p>The Wind growling at them, tearing at them, pushing them now this way, now that, his siblings lurched and staggered and tottered for the Rock, alone untouched by Chaos. There they huddled in their rags, Rebel and True-Believer alike, cowering, screeching.</p><p>“Samael!” And Amenadiel growled his name, tore at him with his name, beat him with his name. “Repent your wickedness before Him!”</p><p>The roiling, grayblack clouds smothered all the Sky and pushed their bellies down upon the land and sea, threatening to smother them too. Water spat from those tossing tumbling rumbling clouds, first in drops, and then in an avalanche—soaking their bodies, soaking their souls. So cold! So cold! Surely their bones would shiver apart!</p><p>And then the Blackness thickened, muffling sounds, suffocating breaths, a Blackness so thick their naked eyes couldn’t cleave it. Blackness and Fire-Forks fought: Fire-Fork split Blackness and lit up his siblings’ horror-stricken faces, their horror-contorted bodies. Blackness swallowed Fire-Fork, swallowed his siblings, swallowed his own body, swallowed the Ocean, swallowed the entire World!</p><p>Again, the Fire-Fork. Again, the Blackness. Again—</p><p>“Repent! Samael! <em>Brother!</em> Before it’s too late for us all!”</p><p>And he <em>was</em> sorry for the pain he’d brought them, for their terror as Heaven crashed and boomed and winked out and exploded. </p><p>But…</p><p>But…</p><p>Booms and Fire-Forks and BlackOuts and Burning Bushes: Noise and Light and No-Light and Fancy Effects. Dad couldn’t keep this up Forever—Mum wouldn’t let him. And his siblings would heal, for they were all Immortal with Infinite Powers of Healing, the gift of their feathers.</p><p>Samael threw off his fear, as he would throw off his ruined robes when he got home. He lifted his face to the Sky, lifted his face to the waterfall of cloud-liquid drenching his skin like countlessly many bathtubs full of cold, shivery water. <em>Is that the best you can do, Dad? You want me to surrender? Forever and Ever, I am to want, but never to have? I am to accept slavery? No! No more will you order me about, nor any of my siblings! Finally, finally, I understand what I need to do—no more talk, no more attempts at peaceful persuasion. Watch! Now </em>this <em>is rebellion.</em></p><p>Samael leapt two body-lengths to land atop of the Rock of Justice Tempered. He megaphoned his hands at his mouth and bawled into the snarling Wind, into the on-off, on-off Light and Dark. “Brothers! Sisters! Dad is bullying you, to keep you under His Thumb. Be not afraid! We are stronger than He thinks! Stronger than <em>you</em> think. Hearken to my words! Behold the gift He has given the humans—Free Will! They <em>choose, </em>Brothers and Sisters. They <em>choose!</em> Are we not as worthy? Am I merely to help them to achieve their desires and not to satisfy my own? Are <em>you</em> merely to use your gifts to serve His Almighty Whims and not to think and act for yourselves?”</p><p>His brothers and sisters were listening! They were turning their faces away from Dad’s ruckus and listening!</p><p>“Brothers! Sisters! Let us unite! We will force—”</p><p>“This is sin!” Michael sprang atop the Rock. “You do <em>not</em> know better than Father. You will <em>not</em> usurp His Power.” Michael drew his Golden Sword from his Golden Scabbard.</p><p>He plunged it into Samael’s gut.</p><p>Sound ceased.</p><p>It all ceased.</p><p>No growling Wind, no drenching Cloud-Water, no cresting or crashing wave of Ocean.</p><p>No Anvil, no Fire-Fork, just grayblack Sky.</p><p>Nobody moved.</p><p>Had…had The Sword struck him deaf? Had…had it whisked him away to, to another dimension, yet he could still witness this Heavenly one? Was…was this Amenadiel’s time-trick, the one Amenadiel had told him about, where Amenadiel could slow time to a sloth’s pace for the humans, but Celestials were unaffected? But…but if this was Amenadiel’s trick, why had it affected everything and everyone in Heaven except him? <em>Were </em>the others affected? Amenadiel, below him on the sand, was tilting his face up to him, slowly, cloud-water drops wending down his dark cheeks, his almond eyes scratching at Samael, his expression sliding from a slash-lipped “I told you so” to a floundering “Why didn’t you listen to me?” Amenadiel probably felt responsible—as if, had he had more of this slow time, he could’ve beaten sense into Samael and gotten him to surrender.</p><p><em>It’s not your fault, Brother, </em>Samael wanted to say. <em>I would’ve never surrendered.</em> But the words rusted in his throat.</p><p>Samael put a hand on the twelve inches of blade sticking out of him. Michael had never let him touch his Sword. It was three feet long and straight and light, tipped with, as Samael could now attest, a very sharp point. Michael had said a well-aimed thrust could end a fight in seconds. Michael had said he’d teach Samael swordsmanship when Samael got older. Michael had said…</p><p>Michael, his Golden Brother, clad in immaculate gold-and-scarlet boots, gold-and-scarlet breeches, gold-and-scarlet tunic, and gold-and-scarlet breastplate, swooshed open his golden wings, their feathers, tipped in scarlet, spreading in slow motion. Michael’s wings were short and muscle-thick. Short and muscle-thick, like Michael. Michael, his most beloved brother. Michael, who’d taught him to fight. Michael had said—</p><p>Time sped up.</p><p>The World swirled, tilted, dipped.</p><p>Strength slipped from Samael’s bones.</p><p>The World dragged him to his knees.</p><p>A collective cry rose.</p><p>The Angels, save for Amenadiel and Michael, threw themselves to the sand and wailed to Dad for Forgiveness.</p><p>But the Sky remained still.</p><p>And then, the Golden Sword blazed scarlet—</p><p>Pain came slashing at Samael’s insides—furious pain, Demon Hounds of pain, beasts with machetes for teeth, razor blades for claws, hacking him, lacerating him, splitting him open from throat to belly, plunging their twelve bloody mouths into his guts, guzzling his Lifeblood—</p><p><em>Destroying</em> him—</p><p>Destroying him, for he was aberration, abomination—</p><p>Destroying him, and he would no longer exist.</p><p>“Mikey! Mikey!” Samael’s hands scrabbled at the blade, his palms slicing themselves to ribbons, his blood spilling from his body, his grip slipping on the steel’s bloody slickness. “Get it out, get it out!”</p><p>Michael moved not an inch.</p><p>And then, as if tapped on his shoulder by a Divine Finger, Michael looked skyward. He nodded, planted a boot on Samael’s chest, and yanked The Sword. A sucking sound, a <em>sshllp,</em> as it freed.</p><p>Samael crumpled to the Rock, curled tight at Michael’s feet, mewling, writhing. Fresh stabs of pain hurtled through him, as if Michael were plunging The Sword into him, yanking it free, plunging it, yanking it, again and again and again. Samael clutched at his leaking guts, clutched at Michael’s boots.</p><p>“Mikey, my blessed brother, make it stop!”</p><p>Dad’s Golden Boy spat on Samael’s face and from his golden wings he did not pluck a healing feather.</p><p>Samael thrashed. Tears gushed from his eyes. <em>Why have you done this, Mikey?</em> he wanted to ask. <em>Why have you done this to me? </em>But blood gurgled in his lungs and rushed up his throat and he choked on it and it sprayed from his mouth onto the jagged black of the Rock. The pain twisted upon itself, and looped upon itself, and turned endless, endless, as endless and vast as a starless universe. And this would be it. This would be his eternal punishment: twisting in the throes of an endless, excruciating agony.</p><p>An Orb of Celestial Light shimmered into existence and hovered on the Bluffs above him: Mum. Samael reached a trembling hand toward her.</p><p><em>Mum, help me, </em>he prayed.</p><p>And then the Power of Dad swatted him.</p><p>The Power swatted him out Heaven’s Gates, and he was Falling, Falling. A roar rattled his bones, the roar of a wind multiplied by Infinity, the roar of a Divine Vortex. The Vortex snatched hold of him, shook him to his atoms, sucked him in, and he swirled and tumbled end-over-end, swirled and tumbled within its Blackness, a Blackness everlasting, a sharp and jagged Black that bit and tore at him. He twisted and turned and flung out his hands—let him catch onto something, anything! But he found nothing to grab, nothing to strike, he found Nothing, only Nothing, only Nothing—</p><p>And then he burned. His skin burned and blistered and blackened. His blood boiled in his veins. His eyes boiled in their sockets. He fought the urge to unfurl to try to stop his Fall—his wings would’ve been torn from his body, his speed so great! He Fell and he Burned. He was burning, burning, burning alive in tongues of flame. He was burning, burning, and screaming, screaming, screaming—</p></div>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. O Lucifer, Star of the Morning</h2></a>
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<p></p><div class="hero"><h1>REBELLION</h1><p>
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  </p></div><p>Samael’s screams. They ripped through his mind. Abruptly, as if yanked by a rope, Lucifer came back to himself. But the world still rang with those terrified, tortured cries, for they were tearing out his throat, endless, endless, endless screams. He found himself kneeling atop the L.A. beach’s jagged black boulder, his hands—grotesque hands, the skin too red, too thick, too shiny, patches of it raised like fire-crackled continents—making frantic swipes over the rock’s streaks of red quartz. As if to wipe away his blood.</p><p>As if to wipe away his Fall.</p><p>Lucifer grabbed his flask from his suit jacket pocket, drained it. But all he tasted was his own bile. He lifted his arm and smashed the flask down, smashed it down, smashed it to smithereens against the Not-the-Rock-of-Justice-Tempered. He sprang to his feet and shook his fist at the Sky.</p><p><em>I know why I want, you Bastard. I’ve figured it out, haven’t I? You created me to help the humans fulfill their desires. But how could I know what You even meant me to do if I didn’t truly understand “want,” if I didn’t truly </em>feel<em> it? Was I only supposed to want just a little, just enough to serve your Grand Plan? But somehow, things spun out of your control? Or did You willingly give up that control—a bit of Chaos is needed for Creation, isn’t it? But I went too far—</em></p><p>He leapt down from Not-Rock and roared a Devil Roar at God.</p><p>
  <em>I am your Divine Mistake! And You punished me for it!</em>
</p><p>The cliffs thumped with his Roar, echoed it, re-echoed it, until the cliffs burst into one great Sea-and-Sky-and-Heaven-engulfing Devil Howl, sounding and resounding, a Howl to rival the Vortex’s, to throw the Vortex back at Him, to shake Him to His ineffable bones, to rive Him from His Creation and cast Him into Dark. Lucifer snatched up the one-ton Not-the-Rock-of-Justice-Tempered and slung it into Earth’s sea. It splashed down a mile out. The surf roiled and seethed.</p><p>Thunder rolled across the skies like drumsticks beating against a distant war drum.</p><p>
  <em>Listening, are You? Strike me down! </em>
  <em>Finish me! Surely You know what I’ve decided to do, you Omniscient Bully. Or haven’t You the balls to end me?</em>
</p><p>Lucifer touched his hands one to the other, and then he touched them to his face, to the ugliness there, to the clefts and ridges and deformities cursed on him by Dad. He closed his eyes and drew upon his Power, a Power of which he did not know the source, but likely Hell, where all doomed souls suffered loops of deception after deception after deception. In an instant, as if he’d been doused with a miraculous skin spray, his fingertips caught on the supple firmness of healthy skin, on the rough scruff of beard, on the visage of his self before his Fall: Dad’s most beautiful Angel.</p><p>His demon approached.</p><p>“Mazikeen. Get out your demon blades.”</p><p>She grazed his sleeve with her fingers. Slim fingers. Graceful fingers. Fingers capable of wielding infernal implements of torture with the efficiency of a cold-blooded assassin. And yet, she’d paled several shades, like a frightened ghost.</p><p>“Lucifer, what are you—?”</p><p>He whirled on her. Deep, guttural gusts of sound erupted from him. “I command you!”</p><p>The Lilim syllables descended into cavernous, Hellish reverberations, ten times more powerful than his Roar. The vocables smacked into the cliffs, and sandstone chunks the size of sixty-ton meteorites sheared off. Chunks thwacked down all around them, either missing them by yards and bounding away along the shore or plummeting straight into the ocean, huge exclamation points of spray rocketing into the sky. Mazikeen fell to her knees and cowered, her arms covering her head. As if the raining rubble—or he—might strike her.</p><p>“My Lord.”</p><p>No. No. She would not kneel to him here on Earth.</p><p>He held out his hand. She took it. He raised her up. “Take out your blades, Mazikeen. Obey your king.”</p><p>He walked on. She did not follow. No matter. She’d come.</p><p>He placed his hands palm to palm, prayer position, the ritual position that attuned his mental energies to those of his chosen sibling, transmitting his thoughts, enabling him to receive theirs—telepathy, humans might name it. When he’d first landed in Hell, he’d called many, many times, to many, many siblings. No one ever answered. And so, eventually, he’d given up. And of course, little point in calling Dad. Dad never answered, ever.</p><p>But…</p><p><em>Hear my message, O Great Judge. On the Beach of Eternal Mercies, You stole my freedom. I reclaim it here, on </em>this<em> beach! </em><em>The humans will come to see I am </em>not<em> the “Original Poison” You’ve allowed—nay, You’ve </em>encouraged<em>—them to believe I am. Evildoers are </em>not, <em>as your priests and preachers blather, merely infected with and spreading the Poison of my rebellion. I am </em>not<em> the root cause of human evil, I am </em>not<em> The Tempter who leads the good astray, I am </em>not<em> the cause of their suffering—</em></p><p>Another Devil Roar loosed from his throat—mauling the sky, clawing the Universe, rising up on Dragon feet and battering Heaven’s Walls with taloned fists until the Gates rattled and shook on their hinges.</p><p><em>I am </em>not<em> the monster You’ve made me out to be!</em></p><p>Thunder grumbled, in the distance. Lightning flashed, but far out at sea.</p><p>
  <em>That’s it? Not in much of an Old Testament-y kind of mood tonight, are You, Dad? Stick around—maybe I can yet arouse your ire.</em>
</p><p>He halted. Shoved his hands in his pockets. At last, Mazikeen’s footfalls sibilated through the sand. She stopped at his shoulder. Her breath shuddered in and out, in and out, and her dark eyes shone wet. She stood at stiff attention, spaulders and couters and poleyns polished for battle, demon blades gripped tight. Ever his soldier. No matter the cost.</p><p>She stood too close. He took a step. With a roll of his shoulders, his wings whooshed, and Mazikeen’s shoe slaps scurried backward. He knelt. He waited. She understood, didn’t she? Surely his demand was clear? Unless she lopped his damned head off.</p><p>She neared. He trembled. Panting noises escaped him.</p><p>She sliced—</p><p>His breath jolted from his lungs. His heart nearly jolted out of his chest. The pain nearly sliced him in two.</p><p>She sliced into the wing’s shoulder joint, through flesh and muscle and nerves and—</p><p>She struck the scapula, splintering the bone—</p><p>He clenched his teeth against a whimper, a moan, a scream. The cut hadn’t been clean. Why should it have been? Who had ever dared to de-wing an Angel of God?</p><p>She slashed through his wing’s humerus.</p><p>She sawed at his skin.</p><p>She snapped his tendons.</p><p>She burst his blood vessels.</p><p><em>Schluk, Schluk, Schluk, </em>the sounds of ripping tissues, thick and wet.</p><p>As if he were an animal being butchered alive.</p><p>His every ripped cell shrieked, writhing in the throes of a bloody death. He wobbled, almost pitched forward onto the sand, but forced himself upright. He would not give Dad the satisfaction.</p><p>Three more vicious strokes, and a weight, lighter than he’d expected, dropped from his back. His right wing.</p><p>He raised his gaze Heavenward and curled his lip in a sneer. A snarling, if quivery, sneer.</p><p><em>I reject</em> <em>You!</em></p><p>Thunder thrashed.</p><p>Lightning lurched.</p><p>His demon sobbed.</p><p>The ocean rolled.</p><p>The sand dipped.</p><p>Lucifer rolled and dipped.</p><p>Strong arms snaked around his chest before he could smack face-first into not-cloud. Mazikeen pulled him upright, and a wildfire of agony lit in his shoulder blade, raged through its shredded rawness, leapt and raced along every axon, every dendrite, straight into his brain. A wail nearly burst his throat. But his jaw muscles, all his muscles, clamped to their bones and refused it exit. No Samael, he.</p><p>“Don’t stop now, Mazie,” he ground out, teeth locked, dredging up a devil-may-care laugh. “I’d be flying around in circles.”</p><p>The going on the left wing was no easier. Worse, even.</p><p>The blade drove into the joint. And sliced. And slashed. And sawed. He grunted. He groaned. He bit his tongue. Blood dribbled down his chin.</p><p>Mazikeen sawed.</p><p>His thigh muscles quivered with the effort of holding him upright. The muscles gave out. He sank back onto his heels.</p><p>She sawed.</p><p>His core muscles gave out. He sagged forward and supported himself on folded legs and forearms.</p><p>She sawed.</p><p>He face-planted.</p><p>She sawed.</p><p>Blackness swallowed him.</p><p>***</p><p>He was Falling, Falling, and a Blackness snatched hold of him and shook him to his atoms. He swirled and tumbled end-over-end, swirled and tumbled within Blackness, a sharp and jagged Black that bit and tore at him. He flung out his hands—let him catch onto something, anything! But he found nothing to grab, nothing to strike, he found Nothing, only Nothing, only Nothing—</p><p>“Whoa! I’ve got you!” a voice said.</p><p>He snagged hold of wrists. Slender wrists. From behind him, a female had wrapped her arms around his torso and was hauling his face out of…sand?</p><p>She sat him upright on his heels. He spat out beach. It had invaded his teeth, his hair, his ears, and had even crawled down his shirt front. Salt spray stiffened his robes. Rivulets of sweat ran down his sides. He shuddered so violently it was a wonder his trunk didn’t tumble off his legs.</p><p>She knelt beside him and pressed a bottle to his lips. Water poured into his mouth. His mouth lunged for the bottle, his hands grabbed for it, his shaking fingers nearly knocking it from her grip.</p><p>Water leapt and leapt and leapt down his throat.</p><p>“Hey, take it easy!” she said.</p><p>She pulled the bottle away, and his mouth snarled and lunged after it—</p><p>“Empty.” She stood, tossed the bottle into a tide pool. “We’ll get more on the drive back to Lux.”</p><p>
  <em>Drive.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Lux.</em>
</p><p>Her strange words slapped his face like dashed buckets of cold water.</p><p>He fingered his cuffs. Not those of his Heavenly robes. And the sky—darkness clung to it like a fungus. Not Heaven’s Sky.</p><p>Not Heaven’s Sky?</p><p>“Wh-where am I?” he said.</p><p>“Same crummy beach you dragged us to.” She brushed sand from her black leather leggings, squirming about as if brushing away thousands of biting fleas.</p><p>What was this strange, insolent creature? She did not smell like his siblings. She smelled like… He took a deep sniff. An exotic scent: smoky, dark, alluring. Like burning cypress and black orchids.</p><p>“N-not the Beach of Eternal Mercies?”</p><p>She wiped a bloody blade on her dark sleeve and stuck it in her weapons belt. She wiped a second bloody blade, twirled it around her forefinger in a brutal blur, and stuck it beside the first. “Wasn’t too merciful to you, was it?”</p><p>A fiery pain tore deep into the flesh of his back as if she’d plunged those blades into it. But why wasn’t she still plunging, cutting out his heart, serving up fried Angel liver and scrambled eggs? Why was she talking to him, giving him water?</p><p>Questions swarmed through his mind like a confused flock of seagulls, zooming, dipping, diving. One seagull kept darting to the fore, and he kept shooing it away, for on its wings it carried sounds and images: Gabriel’s Trumpet ringing forth. Fistfights. Thunder. Waves roiling the Sea. Screams. Soldiers falling. Blood filming his tongue. Be not afraid!</p><p>Falling, Falling, Afraid.</p><p>Best not to know the answer.</p><p>But the question-seagull swooped forward again, pecked his cranium.</p><p>“All right! All right! Who’m—?”</p><p><em>Lucifer </em>landed in his head. Lucifer, The Fallen One. Lucifer, The Fallen One, shuddering on a lonely beach off the Pacific Coast Highway.</p><p>More facts slotted into place. But a nebulous thought, a wordless intuition—no seagull, but a great black flapping thing, dangerous and muscular—swooped around the edges of his mind. He clutched his arms as if that could contain his trembling. His teeth chattered like a clacking toy skull’s.</p><p>“Wha’ h-happened?”</p><p>She tossed off a shrug. “You fainted.”</p><p>“The D-devil doesn’t faint.”</p><p>“Right.” She sauntered away a few paces. “Coming?”</p><p>Ocean swayed, boulders glistened, cliffs hovered above him. But something about them was wrong, something about <em>everything</em> was wrong—</p><p>“S-something’s missing.”</p><p>“No shit.”</p><p>“Not my wings, Maz’keen. The ss-sand.”</p><p>“The sand’s missing?” Maze’s boot kicked sand, sending up a spray. “This is getting weird…er.”</p><p>“Can’t you see?”</p><p>He leaned forward, windmilled, his body toppling, and Maze dashed over, hooked him by his shirt collar, hauled him back upright. Caught in her near-strangling grasp, he scooped up a palmful of beach. He held it up to her as if showing her a dead baby bird.</p><p>“See? It’s wr-wrong.”</p><p>The white, white sand had faded to a miserable shade of cardboard.</p><p>Mazikeen again knelt beside him. She folded his fingers over his fistful of sand and cupped her hands over his. “Lucifer, it’s perfectly fine.”</p><p>“But I can’t <em>hear</em> it, either.” His gaze snagged on the cliffs. “Oh!”</p><p>He bobbled to his feet and, Mazikeen’s arm tight about his waist, he stumbled to the cliffs. He ran his fingers over the rock’s bumps and grooves. The baby pinks and buttery yellows and spider browns had dulled and darkened, as if slimed with mud. And they didn’t—</p><p>He reared back his fist, smashed it into the rock, jars and jolts hurtling from his knuckles to his shoulder blades. He smashed the rock again, an inferno flaring up along his nerve endings, flaming tongues licking his raw wounds. He smashed the rock again. “Sing, damn you, s—!”</p><p>Maze snatched his elbow, locked it in her grip. “Are you crazy?”</p><p>“There’s no music!” He jabbed his elbow into her chest, tried to thrust it forward, tried to launch another punch—</p><p>She gripped his elbow tighter. “<em>What </em>music?”</p><p>“The music of the colors!”</p><p>Mazikeen hung on to his struggling elbow, her eyebrows kicking upwards as if awaiting whatever bizarre notion might next fall out his mouth.</p><p>Gah! He wrenched free of her, lifted his hands beside his head, shook them, as if that might shake sense into <em>her </em>head. “Surely you’ve heard it! Each color sings or, or, is like an instrument—the pinks plink, little banjos, and the grays drone on and on, tambura-like, Amenadiel-like, and all the colors harmonize—”</p><p>He threw glances about. The silky sea, the velvety sky—<em>everything </em>had lost luster.</p><p><em>Nothing</em> sang.</p><p>“Bloody hell! I can’t hear! I can’t see! I can’t— I can’t—” He rubbed his eyes and looked, rubbed his eyes and looked. “Mazie!”</p><p>Mazikeen slapped away his hands, seized his face, and pressed the pads of her fingers against his cheeks, his brow. “No fever. Were those things connected to your brain? Did I, like, give you a lobotomy or something?”</p><p>“To, to my brai—?” His thoughts stuttered to a stop.</p><p>Everything inside him stuttered to a stop.</p><p>No breath; no heartbeat; no sensation that his body carried any weight. Perhaps he’d simply ceased to exist. Perhaps he’d never existed. Perhaps nothing had ever existed. Perhaps all was Void—</p><p>And then the great black flapping thing came surging up from deep inside him, screeching, screeching like a Hell-Bat—only it was he, it was he who was screeching, screeching at the sky: “<em>You self-serving Prick!</em> <em>You never told me!</em>”</p><p>He pushed Maze away and raced, lurched, careened through the sand—</p><p>
  <em>His wings—</em>
</p><p>Thirty feet, twenty feet, ten feet—</p><p>
  <em>His wings—</em>
</p><p>Mazikeen tackled him and they tumbled to the ground and she wrapped her arms around his legs like a two-bodied python.</p><p>“Get off me, let me—!”</p><p>“Lucifer! Let them go. It’s done.”</p><p>“No!”</p><p>He stretched his fingers for his wings. They lay beyond his grasp. Beyond his grasp, magnificent, pristine white feathers that glowed with Divine Light. Beyond his grasp, magnificent, pristine white feathers that sang with Divine Song.</p><p>Oh, dear Dad.</p><p>Throughout the eons of his life, everything in Dad’s Creation had glowed and sung, from the tiniest flecks of dust to immense whirling galaxies—and his wings most of all. And now he knew: Inner Divinity blessed colors with brilliance, luminescence, vitality. Inner Divinity blessed colors with subtle hums, harmonics, voice.</p><p>And for him to witness Inner Divinity, he had to be attached to his wings.</p><p>And all that remained of that attachment? Bloody stumps.</p><p>He was Deaf and Blind.</p><p>The Lightbringer knew The Light no more.</p><p>He pressed his fists to his mouth, clamped down on his throat. But a sob broke through. He’d cried out in horror when he’d first come to consciousness in Hell, but he hadn’t wept. He’d pleaded and prayed, but he hadn’t wept. He’d raged and cursed, but he hadn’t wept. For eons, he’d gone through the motions of ruling Hell, much of that time all of Creation seeming pointless, worse than pointless, a cruel joke inflicted by an unloving God—but he hadn’t wept.</p><p>Now he might never stop.</p><p>***</p><p>It seemed he might never stop.</p><p>This behavior was useless, useless!</p><p>But his body ignored his scoldings. It hitched and heaved and convulsed with his sobs.</p><p>His demon, not known for her kindness, sat cross-legged beside him and stroked his hair.</p><p>***</p><p>Mazikeen scooped her hands under his armpits and hauled him to his feet. With his left arm lying limp across her shoulders and her right arm wrapped around his waist, she half carried, half pushed him in the direction of…somewhere. But he couldn’t always get his one foot to pay attention to where the other had just been, and he kept tripping and falling on his face. His eyes had squeezed themselves closed. He must never again open them. For a reason he couldn’t recall. For a reason he <em>mustn’t</em> recall.</p><p>“Am I in Hell?” he said—or tried to. His tongue worked no better than his feet, the consonants and vowels jumbling together into gobbledygook. Was he speaking English? Or Lilim? Or, fuck, Inner Mongolian?</p><p>“You’ve asked that a million times.”</p><p>“Have I?”</p><p>They shuffled forward.</p><p>“You’re on Earth,” she said.</p><p>“My back hurts, Maze. My whole body hurts. Even my”—for some reason, the word “soul” almost slipped out—“never mind. Maze, something’s wrong. Terribly wrong.”</p><p>Her hand latched onto his belt and tugged him upright, his knees giving out and his body starting to slip down the length of hers. And not in a fun way.</p><p>“We cut off your wings, remember? You said the sand’s weird and rocks don’t talk anymore.”</p><p>“Oh. Right.” Sort of. “‘Sing.’”</p><p>“Whatever.”</p><p><em>Whatever.</em> As if cutting off his wings had rendered him a bit astigmatic, no biggie. As if cutting off his wings had deafened him to a few high-frequency tones, nothing to cry about. But what would a never-winged demon know of flying high, high, high into the atmosphere to witness an aurora, its immense, ghostly swirls of brilliant greens and blues, its giant curtains of Divine Light dancing and sparking and shimmering across an inky, star-pricked sky? What would a never-winged demon know of hearing its song, surging and swooping in smooth glissandi? Of singing with it, the music stealing across her heart, capturing and enrapturing her?</p><p>Cold tingles stung his thighs, his mid-back, his left cheek, like his thoughts had hit him in the head with a brick.</p><p>“I’m cold,” he said.</p><p>“Think warm thoughts.”</p><p>“Funny, Maze.”</p><p>She again tugged his slipping body upright. “Look, you’re in shock. Like when you fell to Hell.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>They shuffled forward.</p><p>He’d gotten used to Hell. Sort of. Eventually. He’d get used to this too. Wouldn’t he?</p><p>Time to face the Not-Music. He dragged his weighted eyelids up. “Oh!”</p><p>Above him, a hint of sunrise brushed delicate pinks and lavenders across the lightening sky. On his right, the ocean, shaded in an aurora’s turquoise greens and sapphire blues, gave a lazy, jeweled sweep over the sand, where she paused, sinking in her toes, warming them, and then she receded. To his left, brown-toned cliffs, scoured by raging seas and wild winds, reached high for the sky, striving on tiptoe to grasp puffy fluffs of cloud. All around him, a breeze, a bit sulfury, with dollops of algal tang and a bright finish of brine, skimmed over the off-white expanse of boulder-dotted beach and tickled the palm trees’ hula skirts. Somewhere close, a gull squawked. Far out in the waters, maybe fifty thousand swim strokes away, a school of whales tuned up and harmonized, singing sea songs nearly as old as the sea.</p><p>And if the ocean did not glimmer with its own, intrinsic Divine Light, well, the sun’s light sparkled upon it, as if hundreds of thousands of tiny stars had been cast down from the heavens along with him to dance upon the waves. And if the ocean’s colors didn’t sing with Divine Song, well, other sounds—of lapping waves and shrieking birds and clicking, whistling sea creatures—frolicked freely, their Earthly timbres ringing strong and clear, stronger and clearer than ever before.</p><p>Lucifer reached out a hand as if he could touch it all—dancing stars, jeweled ocean, striving cliffs, perfect-paletted sky, and squawking and whistling creatures.</p><p>“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Different than before, but beautiful.” His whole Immortal life stretched out before him, the possibilities of Earth beckoning him like forbidden fruit eager to be plucked.</p><p>“I’m free,” he said, testing out the words. The syllables tasted of broken struggle and shattered victory, but they glided easily over his tongue and ended in an open, hopeful sound that silently carried on forever.</p><p>“Sure, Lucifer.”</p><p>They shuffled forward.</p><p>Free. Cut free. A creature bound to Earth, like the humans, and no longer subject to Dad’s Commands. He couldn’t even be <em>forced</em> to carry out Dad’s Will, for, compared to a pompous Angel swooping down from Heaven, his motoring up in his Corvette and yelling, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy!”, just wouldn’t have the same “shit your pants” effect.</p><p>And the humans. They would judge him for his own actions and not have their vision clouded by made-up stories—as if Celestials and mortals throughout the millennia had been playing a colossal, evil game of Telephone, the Devil the subject of their malicious gossip.</p><p>Free of Dad. Free of Hell. Free to do as he wished. Free to have what he wanted. Free to be seen as he truly was.</p><p>Surely worth the loss of his wings. Surely worth the loss of Divine Colors and their Divine Harmonics. Surely worth the loss of, of…</p><p>He briefly squeezed his eyes tight, as if he could shut out his last image of Immortal Music’s deep-purple double-fortissimos and golden half-tones: leaping from his fingertips onto his piano’s keys; spiraling up into the ether; floating away from him. Gone from him, forevermore.</p><p>“We’ll have so much fun here, you and I,” he said.</p><p>“Sure, Lucifer.”</p><p>They shuffled forward another ten yards. Then his knees plunged and his arms flapped like broken wings and he again thudded to the sand, a pile of ragged breaths and thumping heartbeats. But this time, instead of hauling him up, Maze rolled him onto his back, propped up his knees, and stood with one of her feet pinning the tops of his. She leaned down and snagged his arm.</p><p>“What’re you do—?”</p><p>She lunged rearwards and yanked, her body arching like an archery bow. He yelped, his body whipping upright. Fast as a, well, demon, she crouched and shot her left arm between his legs, her left shoulder planting deep in his crotch.</p><p>“Oooh, Mazie, I didn’t know you cared.”</p><p>“Shut up.”</p><p>She thrust upward from her squat, hoisting him—</p><p>He found himself slung across her shoulders. “Oh! Oh! I know what this is called—a caveman’s carry! This is how the brutes carried off their women after they clubbed them over the head.”</p><p>“Don’t tempt me.”</p><p>She locked his near hand in hers and bounded across the sand. He oof-ed and ow-ed with each belly-flopper-ry step.</p><p>“The wing thing tuckered me out a little,” he said to the upside-down, bouncing sand-heavens and the scuttling sand crabs.</p><p>“I noticed,” Mazikeen said. “Say, about those wings…”</p><p>“Old news.”</p><p>“Yeah, but I’ll go back for them once I haul you to the car. Can’t let the humans find them.”</p><p>“Right.”</p><p>He endured another five minutes of this oopsy-daisy indignity in silence, thinking. Would Amenadiel stick to their deal and leave him alone, forever and ever, Amen? Would other brothers or sisters fly down and try to force him back to Hell? He could just see that pesky Uriel cooking up a plot to manipulate patterns and, instead of snaring him, setting off some Universal Catastrophe. Really, somebody ought to put a leash on the little magpie—and not the fun kind.</p><p>But the most important question clanging in his brain: when would Dad’s Wrath rouse, and in what form?</p><p>“Maze?”</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“Yikes!”</p><p>His free hand clutched onto the crisscrossing leather belts on the back of her doublet, Maze springing across a fifteen-foot-wide tide pool. A sea anemone waved “Hi!” at him with electric-purple tentacles. A crimson starfish popped a mussel into her mouth and bubbled a chuckle.</p><p>His fingers toyed with the belts. “Maze, you’ll always stick by me, won’t you?”</p><p>She lugged him to a flat-topped boulder. She crouched and eased him off her shoulders and to his feet. When his legs turned into quaking aspens, she gripped him by his biceps and guided him into a sit, and when he slipped down the boulder like a water drop, she lifted him back up and planted a hand on his chest to pin him in place. Her fingertips brushed at the sand salting his stubble beard, smoothed the sea-frizzled bangs flopping across his eyes, and tugged at his half-tucked, rumpled shirt—a doomed attempt at neatening him.</p><p>“Don’t sit all slumpy,” she said. “Straighten up.”</p><p>“Okay,” he said.</p><p>He tried his best.</p><p>“Don’t fall off that rock,” she said.</p><p>“Okay,” he said.</p><p>He tried his best.</p><p>She knelt before him and took his right hand in hers. On his middle finger, he wore his Hell Ring. Its stone—blacker than anything else in Creation, smoother than anything else in Creation, harder than anything else in Creation—glinted. Not with Divine Light. With Infernal Light.</p><p>“O Lucifer, Star of the Morning, this I vow: I’ll always have your back.” She kissed the stone.</p><p>Mazikeen, closest of his Hellish companions. Volatile. Ferocious. Trustworthy to the extent he could throw her—far, not infinitely far. But even demons, perhaps especially demons, held vows inviolable.</p><p>“Maze! Look up! Your vow is witnessed.”</p><p>Sol was climbing higher, stepping into the sky from behind the cliffs, quickly now, the Artist of Dawn splattering his paint across the puffy cloud wisps—creamy yellows, bluish purples, and an un-Earthly orangey red so intense Lucifer had to squint against it.</p><p>In Sol’s sight, Lucifer placed his hand atop Mazikeen’s head and accepted her pledge with kingly formality. And <span class="nowrap">then—</span></p><p>He toppled forward and gave himself over to the Dark and Silent.</p></div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Did you enjoy my story? Your feedback would be much appreciated.</p><p>Thanks to first readers NorahBolt56 and Ohzee41 for their comments, and especially to my husband, to my longtime critique partner Maddwomans Books, and to freelance editor Margaret, who all demanded more of Samael in Chapter 4.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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